Drop In: Online PD

Online PD presentation slides for the Fall 2015 MASSP conference. 

Providing flexibility and choice are two ways to respect teachers as professionals. Honoring digital opportunities is one way to bring choice and flexibility to PD.

In my work in leading PD efforts, I've dabbled with online options. My wife has much more experience. I don't know how many will appreciate the '80's skateboarding reference, but compared to her I'm a poser and she's a thrasher. 

What we've learned is that teachers appreciate being able to bank an occasional PD hour on their own time, perhaps in their  PJ's. Taking PD online has other advantages as well. Gauging the level of engagement is often easier than the typical large group face to face session, and it also provides some teachers, who have been passively watching their colleagues enjoy the half pipe of technology, a less threatening way to drop in.

Overcoming Challenges: Small Schools and PLC's

Anyone who properly uses the noun, "gymocafetorjum" automatically gains credibility with small school educators like myself who are used to wearing many hats and being creative to meet the needs of students. Aaron Hanson, former National Model School Principal and author of How to Develop PLCs for Singletons and Small Schools, understands the challenges of using collaborative models in small settings.

His book provides practical tips and examples for educators whose journey through the collaborative process gets stuck at the question: How do my students receive the value of common assessments when I don't have anyone with whom to collaborate on assessments because I'm the only one teaching this in my district? 

Hanson details several strategies including interdisciplinary teams, singletons who support, and virtual teams, but the strategy that seems to offer the most benefit to students in my setting is the effective use of vertical teams.

Hansen argues that the most important tasks vertical teams can take on are identifying essential skills and agreeing to the level of rigor necessary to demonstrate proficiency. He offers straightforward protocols for beginning these discussions.

I'll break from Hansen and offer two specific examples of how these discussions could play out. Consider the first image below. Suppose the Algebra I instructor in a district defined proficiency as the ability to answer the questions at the top of the image and mastery as the ability to answer the questions at the bottom. If the teachers in the grade levels below and above held different visions of profficiency, confusion could result. Similarly in the second image we find objectives for a biology course. If one teacher defines proficiency as the ability to compare and contrast animal and plant cells using six of the terms listed correctly, students would be challenged differently than if the instructors below or above believed proficiency should be gauged by the ability to provide textbook definitions for all the terms present.

Students in small schools deserve to have teachers who engage in these conversations. Hansen shows us how to begin.

Borrowed from SLPCSchools

DESE's Biology CLE's