Making the Most of Professional Development: Tips for the Teacher
Education is constantly changing. Gone are the days when a teacher learns everything that needs to be known in teacher college. Teachers must constantly update their grades or improve their teaching skills by attending regular professional development. This became clear to me when I became Head of Mathematics. One of my most important duties was the professional development of my staff. However, that also meant that I had to embark on constant professional development before I could fulfill my responsibility to develop my staff.
Often times the professional development I attended was ordered by the education authority and I had to pass it on in the future. I had to develop a strategy to make the most of these opportunities so that I could give good feedback to my staff.
This is how I did it. Obviously, you would need to take notes in the workshop, but they needed to focus on how you should convey the information. Therefore, I would divide my notebook in half. The left side was titled “New Information” and the right side “What action should I take?” On the left side, you would write down the new idea / instruction in blue. On the right side, he would write in red what action he should take. The next day he would develop an action plan. That would include what I had to do to get the ideas across to my staff. An essential part of this action plan was writing a report that would reach everyone. Often it took me to give the staff a short workshop.
This eventually led me to present professional development workshops to teachers from other schools. In those workshops, I challenged my audience to come out of the workshop with an action plan. In fact, in the workshop brochure, I included a sample Proforma action plan as an example of how I went about making the most of professional development personally.
One thing I always did was decide on an idea that I would implement in my classes the next day. I knew I needed to ‘hit while the iron is hot’ or professional development would turn into a ‘good’ day out of my classes.
Below is an example of the action plan that I included in my workshop brochures. The action plan was in the form of a series of questions that the teachers would ask themselves.
MY ACTION PLAN
What new teaching strategies can I try?
What can I try in my classroom now?
What resources should I buy?
What resources should I try?
What new skills do I need?
How can I get these new skills?
What more Inservice do I need?
How do I get it?
What new evaluation ideals could you try or use?
Are there other useful ideas to consider?