Teachers and administrators struggle to find time to work and learn together in meaningful ways. There are plenty of meetings scheduled. Many teachers leave these meetings though with the feeling of “could have spent my time doing more important things”.
- How do we squeeze in one more meeting to help teachers grow as professionals?
- How do we add one more opportunity for teachers to learn important new skills?
- How do we give teachers the time to learn with and from their own colleagues?
- How can teachers learn from what is going on in the classroom next door?
- how do we build capacity for professional development from within?
One answer could be to build a Professional Development Learning Hub for your school! Having a platform to document learning, organize and archive initiatives, action research, and institutional memory will give your teachers not only a place to reflect, make their thinking and learning visible, and learn from each other, it will also give them a space to practice valuable “now” skills and literacies. Always remembering, that if we want teachers to deeply embed the skills of communicating, collaborating, connecting and creating as well as media literacy, information literacy, network literacy, global literacy and digital citizenship in their teaching, they have to be able to experience them in their own learning.
- How is your school crowdsourcing professional learning, so everyone can learn from a conference, workshop or a book study, not only the selected few who were physically present.
- How is your school amplifying learning by extending and connecting professional learning that most often happens in isolation?
- How is your school sharing best practices, action research, and innovative practices in education beyond your campus?
It might be time for your school to build a PD Learning Hub!
You can read more in previous blog posts:
- Building a Professional Development Hub for your School- Part 1: Why?
- Building a Professional Development Hub for your School- Part 2: Characteristics
- Building a Professional Development Hub for your School- Part 3: Challenges
- Building a Professional Development Hub for your School- Part 4: Steps
Below my slidedeck for a recent presentation at the Tri-Assocation conference in San Jose, Costa Rica.
Creating a Professional Development Learning Hub for your School from Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano
cross posted at langwitches.org/blog
Silvia Tolisano is a Curriculum21 faculty member, author of the book Digital Storytelling Tools for Educators and founder of the Around the World with 80 Schools project. Read more at http://langwitches.org/blog.
