Positive Professional Development (Inquiry Blog 3)

 

"Your blog post this week should focus on finding ideas, solutions and suggestions for meeting the ICT professional needs of your many communities in your own school. What can you do differently, or new, this year that better support their inservice?" 

-Inquiry Project 3, LIBE 477B, UBC

I found this topic surprisingly interesting! I enjoyed reading the research about what makes professional development effective, and it was fun to brainstorm some ways I could support professional development in the school.

Image from pixabay.com

First, the research. Hill and Papay did a literature review on effective professional development (2022). They came up with six recommendations:

• Encourage peer collaboration
• Use focused coaching
• Add follow up meetings
• Target instructional practices over content knowledge
• Prioritize practical materials over theory
• Deliver more PD focused on relationships with students

Image from pixabay.com

I also read an article by Melnikova, who wrote about microlearning. She led a professional development course as a “group chat on a messaging platform…which we had already used for work-related communication at our school” (2023). Every month, she would post an article and 3-5 teaching tools and challenge her course participants (practicing teachers) to try one of the tools out in their classroom. The participants would reply to her post with their positive and negative experiences. At the end of the course, Melnikova received positive feedback that she attributed to having made the course accessible by using social media and microlearning.

Personally, I enjoy professional development more when I am doing it with a team. For example, several teachers at my school applied for a collaborative inquiry grant from our district to investigate how we could bring elements of outdoor learning into our urban classrooms. We were given money to spend on materials and the group would meet every couple of months after school to discuss the topic. I enjoyed this professional development experience because it was a safe, low pressure space to talk about trying new ideas. I also liked being able to explore an idea over the entire school year. The fact that this experience was collaborative and happened over time matches two of the recommendations from Hill and Papay.

Considering both articles and my personal experience, I get the sense that studying practical teaching strategies with the same group of people over time is a good recipe for positive professional development experiences. Canva helped me make a pretty infographic to share my specific ideas on how I could support professional development about ICT:

1. Becoming part of the Pro-D Committee at the school would allow me to share my opinions on which topics are most important and help steer what professional development is offered at the school.

2. Recommending digital literacy events put on by the district is a relatively easy thing to do. If teachers get the information, they may go.

3. Teams is a digital tool that my district uses to share information. As Melnikova used a messaging app to teach her microlearning course, I could use Teams to post information about an ICT teaching tool (maybe this Padlet Tutorial) and ask what people think of it. People who engage with the post might be interested in trying it in their classroom.

4. Demonstrating the use of digital resources with students would be an excellent and practical moment of ICT professional development. If I offered to co-teach units with classroom teachers, and included digital resources where possible, I could model the use of ICT during class time

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5. I participated in a collaborative inquiry group a few years ago. I could see if any teachers at my school would be interested in doing another inquiry, with the goal of exploring ways to increase digital literacy in primary students.

6. A paper poster shares information with whoever reads it. Putting up posters with useful ICT facts in places where people linger (staff room, photocopier) encourages them to read the poster. Check out Potty PD by Burns (2021)!

Out of all six potential pro-d ideas, I suspect that demonstrating the use of various digital tools while co-teaching a unit would be the most successful. I'd be collaborating with peers, sharing an instructional strategy, prioritizing practical materials, and (likely) having post-lesson discussions with the co-teacher. That list incorporates four recommendations from Hill and Papay's research. Therefore, I would focus my teacher-librarian energy on learning to use new digital tools and sharing them with others at my school. I'd also join the pro-d committee at my school.

Works Cited:

Burns, M. "4 Reasons to Consider Potty PD This School Year." Class Tech Tips, December 22, 2021. https://classtechtips.com/2021/12/22/potty-pd/ . Accessed October 21, 2023.

Canva. www.canva.com. Accessed October 21, 2023.

Melnikova, V. "Setting Up In-house Microlearning for Teachers via a Message app." Edutopia, October 10, 2023. www.edutopia.org/article/microlearning-teachers-message-app. Accessed October 21, 2023.

Hill, H. and Papay, P. "Building Better PL: How to Strengthen Teacher Learning." Research Partnership for Professional Learning, October 25, 2022. https://annenberg.brown.edu/sites/default/files/rppl-building-better-pl.pdf. Accessed October 21, 2023.

"Padlet Tutorial for Teachers + 8 Ways to Use With Students." YouTube, uploaded by Pocketful of Primary, November 22, 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9IQVofS43I.