Thinking over my many years as an educator, I can recall umpteen hours of meetings and professional development. Typically and traditionally, those were hours spent listening to a mix of administrators, professional speakers, coworkers, and videos “teaching” myself and my coworkers new skills for implementation. This act of listening, however, rarely led to direct changes within our classroom environments throughout the school. So what’s going on here?
(O’Leary, 2017)
The Why -
Ineffective professional learning has been seen and felt by teachers around the world. This idea was also mentioned multiple times throughout Gulamhussein’s (2013) report “Teaching the Teachers: Effective Professional Development in an Era of High Stakes Accountability” where it describes how professional learning workshop models are ineffective since they have no impact on student learning outcomes and also no direct impact on teacher practices. Why is that?
According to the data, teachers actually need about fifty hours of learning through a combination of direct instruction, practice, and coaching before a new ideas or strategy is mastered and put into practice effectively (Gulamhussein, 2013). How crazy to reflect upon! It really makes me think about all the time that has been spent merely “sitting and getting” within past school districts.
Many additional studies back up this same claim: Most Professional Learning time is wasted.
The New Teacher’s Project website published a study entitled “The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth About our Quest for Professional Development.” This report (2015) indicates very few differences between teachers who have improved and teachers who have decreased in overall improvement through professional learning and professional development times. This is not a promising data correlation. School systems around the world have hired TNTP to solve their educational problems and setbacks. Through their case studies, they have discovered that school districts spend on average $18,000 per teacher each year on professional development costs despite their ineffectivess (“The Mirage,” 2015). Maybe there’s a better way!
SUPPORTING VIDEO
The What -
The professional learning and development research that I will be creating is focused on Blended Learning.
“Blended Learning” creates personalized and competency-based learning, educational efficiency, increases content and contextual relevance, authenticity, and provides opportunities for individualized differentiation, remediation, and extension for each student within the classroom.
My audience will be targeted toward secondary teachers and administrators. These lessons will be able to be applied to any campus! How great!!
Want to learn more?
a) Try clicking on the links above.
b) Check out my Innovation Plan directed at implementation of Blended Learning.
c) Or read through a research-based literature review on the same topic.
This will be a topic worthy of effective professional learning and development.
The How -
As I work through this project, I will be using the Screencastify screencapture app as an extension on Google Chrome to record my professional learning and development video lessons. I will also be using TikTok’s green screen features to help with visuals during the video editing phase. The iMovie software on my laptop will assist with further editing and the final production of my PL videos.
I will also be focusing on utilizing 5 key principles of effective PL:
1) DURATION: The duration of professional learning surrounding the ideas of Blended Learning must be significant and ongoing to allow time for teachers to learn new strategies and grapple with possible implementation setbacks.
2) SUPPORT: There must be ongoing support for a teacher during the implementation stage that addresses the specific challenges of changing classroom practice to reinforce Blended Learning.
3) ENGAGEMENT: Teachers’ initial exposure to a concept should not be passive, but rather should excite and engage teachers through varied approaches so they can participate actively in making sense of this new Blended Learning practice.
4) MODEL: Modeling has been found to be extremely effective in helping teachers understand new practices, such as Blended Learning.
5) SPECIFICS: The content of Blended Learning presented to teachers shouldn’t be generic, but instead specific to their subject/discipline or grade-level.
Throughout these key principle concepts, I will be teaching ideas surrounding “Blended Learning” and how to successfully go from the understanding phase of BLoom's Taxonomy all the way through to application and further into evaluation.
I am excited to continue this project, so let’s go!!
Any questions? Please post a comment below the citations.
Works Cited
O’Leary, W. (2017, February 23). 5 best practices for personalized professional
development. Blog.edmentum.com. https://blog.edmentum.com/5-best-practices-
personalized-professional-development
Gulamhussein, A. (2013). Teaching the teachers effective professional development in an
era of high stakes accountability. Center for Public Education.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/j13c5mk092kmqv9/Teaching_Effective_Professional_
Developmt.pdf?dl=0
The Mirage: confronting the hard truth about our quest for professional development.
(2015). In tntp.org. The New Teacher Project. https://tntp.org/publications/view/the-
mirage-confronting-the-truth-about-our-quest-for-teacher-development
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