In 2013, I am committing to completely redesign how my District offers professional development. With all of the changes occurring in education, several things are clear:
1. The need for extensive professional development over a wide variety of topics exists.
2. Simply adding a professional development (day, hour, session, etc.) to teacher contracts will be insufficient to meet the learning challenge.
3. Traditional whole group 'sit and get' meetings destroy autonomous learning and must be dramatically scaled back.
4. Learning ownership must be transfered from the district/building level to the individual teacher level, thereby driving engagement and responsibility.
The re-design will be based in part on game-theory and tied to a set of District created teacher competencies, as well the teacher self evaluation and goal setting process in the new Ohio Teacher Evaluation System.
If it works out my additional commitment is to share the entire system/process with others.
What is your big professional goal for the new year?
Technology, changing PD, and better (not yet "best") practices are catching up with educational philosophers who espoused what schools should be but were rarely able to find examples of anyone doing it well. We have access to tech tools, tech teachers, and shared practices, but are we transforming the class"room" to "world class" competitive learning dynamics that toss out the learning curve toward limitless possibilities for each US student? How fast can we catch up to create students to be marketable worldwide while loving the public school experience and being good citizens? As an admin, besides keeping up technologically, I am challenged to motivate and equip teachers today to go beyond where I have ever gone myself as a classroom teacher. This requires openness and modeling my own excitement for learning better ways of learning. We are all in the process of becoming. We need to be the self-educators that we want our students to be. We need to share openly our own transformative practice, which I find fascinating, liberating, and motivating!
ReplyDelete