Professional Development
One of the primary responsibilities of a teacher leader is the design and delivery of professional development for teachers. Sometimes the purpose is to provide inspiration and motivation, other times the purpose is to inform teachers of new policies or methodologies. Whatever the purpose, I always try to create engaging and informative presentations that reflect best practices.
World Class Training
This was a presentation that my team and I developed for the beginning of the school year. The purpose of the presentation was to motivate teachers for the new school year, share the superintendent's vision of a "World Class" school district, provide information about professional learning communities (PLC's), changes to the teacher evaluation system, and to introduce ourselves as teacher leaders and explain how we will support teaching and learning throughout the school. We included interactive components such as the collaborative activity to define world class and the survey using Polleverywhere in order to model best practices and keep our audience engaged. We used the definitions of a world class school that the groups developed in order to create the following wordle. The wordle was shared with the faculty immediately after the training; notice that the word "student" is the largest. |
Reading Strategies Training
I realized there was a need for this training after having a conversation with one of our first-year teachers. He was a music education major and admitted to me that he was clueless about how to teach reading. He was hired at our school to teach chorus as well as Freshmen Success, a class designed to provide 9th graders with the strategies and tools to be a successful learner. He knew that he would need to teach reading strategies as a critical component of this course, and he was eager to learn how to do so. I designed this training within the first few weeks of the school year and offered it after school as an optional educational opportunity to all new teachers and any veteran teacher who would like a "refresher" on reading instruction. Some of my administrators warned me not to expect a very good turn out for an optional training, but we were impressed to see that about 30 percent of our teaching faculty attended. All feedback after the training was positive, and it provided the groundwork for ongoing support in reading strategy instruction for our newest teachers that has continued ever since. |
Guidelines for Professional Learning Communities
Our second mandatory faculty training of the year was designed to provide teachers with the principles necessary for effective professional learning communities (PLC's). Each department is required to meet for monthly PLC sessions. The primary goal of each PLC is to collaborate to share ideas, expand our professional knowledge, and use data to steer our instructional decisions. Our superintendent has emphasized The Four Agreements, a book that provides guidelines for personal behavior as the formula for the professional behavior of PLC members. This presentation was designed as an interactive powerpoint. Each "Think-Pair-Share" slide contained a blank chart labeled "Application to PLC's" and "Application to Teaching". We asked the staff to discuss how the agreements applied to each topic and we recorded what they shared by typing directly onto the chart. Afterwards we sent the completed powerpoint presentation out to the faculty via email so they would have it as a reference. |
Critical Thinking Skills - Analysis
The district is requiring that all schools conduct inservice trainings throughout the year on how to teach critical thinking skills. The first skill that we focused on is analysis. Analysis is a complex process that can be challenging to teach, but it is a critically important skill for the Common Core curriculum that Florida has adopted. Since the teachers at our school have been feeling overwhelmed by the amount of professional development that has been required of them this year already, our principal insisted that this training be distributed electronically. We emailed the powerpoint and link to a survey on Surveymonkey that asked two follow-up questions: 1.How does the skill of analyzing connect to something you already do in your classroom? 2.How might you integrate this skill more explicitly in your lessons in the future? In addition to these two questions, we also asked for feedback on the presentation format. Ninety-five percent of the respondents indicated that they preferred the electronic inservice presentation over the traditional face-to-face method. Based on those results, we will continue with this format for remaining critical thinking skills inservice trainings. |
Analysis in Writing
The next logical step after the school-wide analysis training was to share specific strategies to teach analytical writing skills with the English PLC. After discussing this with the English PLC members at our October meeting, I agreed to read a chapter on analysis and interpretation in Kelly Gallagher's book Write Like This and to share strategies from it at our meeting in November. The presentation was well-received and I have already had one teacher ask me to conduct a model lesson based on some of these strategies with her classes. |