Jared's Module Four Response

What are your thoughts about effective professional development strategies? Describe a professional development opportunity that led to your adoption of new teaching or leadership practices. What made this professional development opportunity effective from your perspective?

I consider myself a cheerful employee.  I am never the first to complain when it is time for a professional development workshop.  I try to keep an open mind.  However, many stand-alone workshop experiences I find myself among those that spurns the general idea.  They are unwelcome by the staff, as they are often wedged into inconvenient points in the schedule.  And, due to the time constraint, they usually contain no real content but more of an invitation to explore the content later… if you think of it.  I can see why it is “the form most criticized in the literature” (Garet et al. 2009). 

However, it was at one of the forms that shares the characteristics of a workshop where I found my first meaningful professional development.  A colleague of mine, the school’s Spanish teacher, invited me to a part of program called “Go Global.”  I signed on for the conference because this particular teacher had a great attitude toward education.  She made it an experience for her students and was always looking for unique opportunities for other teachers.  I really wanted to learn from her in this.  Go Global was a summer institute, a four day conference, full of workshops centered around using communication technology, and creative projects to help your students learn about other cultures and to collaborate on work with students in other countries.  Even though this conference did not really follow the job-embedded professional development model or any of the reform type models (Garet et al. 2009), it did help me to make many valuable connections and helped to change the way I viewed my classroom.  As I remember, six teachers and the principal from our school attended the conference, and this was the first time I had the chance to spend long periods of time with other educators talking about new strategies for my particular school.  This was also the first time I was really introduced to the idea that internet could be used for long distance student collaboration.  Looking back, I’d say this conference helped plant the seeds of digital media in my teaching.  Ultimately, I did learn a lot from the teacher who invited me to this conference.  So even though it was one of the less effective methods of professional development, I think it still had a lasting effect.

What is the PD strategy or strategies you plan to use in your Technology Integration Initiative? How will this strategy or strategies help you achieve the outcomes for your TI Initiative? 

I have the pleasure of working with a colleague on my Technology Integration Initiative.  We are working to apply for a small grant through our PDS relationship with Fairmont State.  We’d like to help teachers at our school (ourselves included) discover even more of the ways the “blended” classroom could help reach students and parents in new ways.  Last year, we all began studying the idea of the “flipped” classroom, and there have been a few days where we have met to review student work, or share ideas.  Through that, many of have realized that “blended” rather than “flipped” seems to work best in our community.  Although we are still hammering out the details of what we want to do, we do know that our professional development strategy is key.  We spent lots of time last Thursday talking about this.  I am currently leaning toward some creative way to provide some job-embedded development such as a critical friends group (Croft et al. 2010).  This sort of emerged naturally with our “flipped” discussion.  I think this could really be a year to hone our technology integration skills through working together to show how the “blended” model could be used more effectively in our school.  I will let you know more about plan in a couple of weeks, since our grant proposal is due at the end of the month!

What will you need to do to provide leadership to successful professional development (here you might think back on the results and your analysis of your Leadership Assessment and/or the  resources/challenges present in the context for delivering professional development)?

Being one of the three teachers working on this TI Initiative and Grant Proposal will require some leadership from me.  This was another thing a colleague and I discussed in our recent meeting.  We still have a lot to think about, but we know that we will have to do some work up front to get teachers interested in integrating technology in a way that empowers students.  Somewhere, in a previous course, I picked up the term “web-evangelist.”  Somehow, I feel like this project is asking me to play that role.  As learned from my Leadership Assessment, I am weak in providing a clear sense of goals to my teammates.  I will have to be very intentional when communicating the purpose of this initiative.

 Please also share any literature or resources you are using to refine your focus and develop your plan.

At the beginning of the school year we were using Flip Your Classroom by Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams.  This is sort of a jumping off point for next year’s focus. 

Although this next resource is isn’t an academic article, I did find it helpful.  My colleague referred me to this teacher’s blog where I found some great presentations: http://janinecampbell.weebly.com/blended-learning.html. This will take you to a great Blended Learning Prezi, but this educator’s blog homepage is nice too.

Brand-Ed Thinking

Brand-ed “fuses the brand concept with education.”  I get this concept, and I think I started really working for this before I knew what it was called after I took a class with Dr. Price from Fairmont State.  His presence on the web had certain creative vibe.  He chose a logo for his class, and designed the syllabus with graphics and images.  I feel that I had a sense of what his class was going to be like, and even what his values were before the class even began.  I think many schools work hard to create a organizational brand.  My school has a logo, a website, a certain image it longs to promote in the community.  I think classrooms can have something similar.

PLN

At my school we have a monthly lunch meeting for the department.  There is a sense, however, that there is not enough time to do any meaningful work.  I think there is a sense that we’d like to be a communicative network, but most of us keep to ourselves due to time constraints in the workday.