Is teacher training becoming artificial and robotic? Are districts providing professional development that is authentic? Do you think your district's online training is beneficial? Do you feel like the online training is just to fulfill a requirement? Is this a new age of check box PD?
I love your bitmoji! Thanks for sharing your Twitter handle. You share some very inspirational and thought-provoking tweets!
ReplyDeleteI have a question for you to respond to.
DeleteI have no idea what happened here! When I replied to this, I could have sworn it didn't have text to it. I'm sorry if I missed the mark on this...
DeleteHi Veronica,
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if professional development is really that authentic. I would love to have the time to attend some of it after school but there is never any time. It is completely not even possible with everything else. What I can comment on though is that I feel like at any given moment I have to do 3 things at once in order to keep my head above water. Which as a result means that no one thing gets done well. So in that regard, I feel like a lot of what we do in general is just to fulfill a requirement. Can you tell I'm in a pessimistic mood mixed with "overwhelmed mode?" I can safely say that GCN trainings are check box PD while the curriculum feedback meetings with curriculum coordinators probably are not. But I won't be able to determine that as I will never be able to attend. Unless they can fit it in during a team plan where 18 other things are happening at the same time. Okay, I'll stop, ha!
Is it possible to have authentic online PD for teachers? What must be in place for this to happen? Remember the our Danielson training?
DeleteI don’t want to speak for Michelle...but I interpret her statement as to mean we need more time in our day if we are to have more face to face PD as well as online PD. The PD we’ve done in the past where we all convened in the cafeteria in my opinion was a waste. We couldn’t hear...people were conversing, it wasn’t beneficial in my opinion. As it was stated in class...maybe you said it, the teams could have been broken down and it would have been more beneficial in smaller settings than how we did it at our school. I do believe there can be beneficial online PD. Unfortunately, as Michelle stated...we always have 3 things on our to do list and it’s overwhelming to throw more on there. Do we continue to do it and keep going...I think WE are more robotic because we never stop. I have signed up for numerous classes but, but I also have older kids who are more self sufficient. I can stay after school. Not all of us have that flexibility. I can speak from experience with the Mastery Connect PD...I have been bad about continuing the PD’s. Truthfully, I forgot and I’m always on the go. Do I need to do it, yes...because this will be part of my job. I’ll probably do it on the weekends or stay up late to get it done. Because we, teachers, keep going and going...just like the Energizer bunny.☺️
ReplyDeleteLaura,
DeleteThank you for your response.There are certainly benefits to digital professional development. I think it is also important to balance it with the power of community and relationship. The reality is that some of our life will have “checklist” based accountability. I think digital training can be very bad and broad based. Digital training can make us “feel” the checklist accountability. In District 86, it would be the GCN trainings and the original introduction to Danielson Framework.
One of the reasons I love this cohort is the relationship opportunity. Most of what we do is online and done well. Our work is specific and well planned and executed. It is authentic!
How would you feel about an introduction to something being done online and hosting a face-to-face session to dive deeper into a topic or tool? I feel like it's very difficult to get through how to use a tool and how to implement it well in 1.5 hours. I'm wondering if the how-to part can't be a YouTube video and we can actually dive in deeper while we have that time together. Thoughts?
ReplyDeleteI think diving deeper can be done on-line also. I love trying a tool and then diving deeper by using Twitter and Google+
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