Delivering Powerful Professional Development

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What:

Professional development, conferences, meetings, workshops, etc often get a bad rap for being boring and in-effective. I truly believe that professional development given correctly can drastically change a teacher’s career. I know that I have personally been positively effected by dynamic professional development workshops where passionate teachers shared their ideas, tips, and tricks to being a more effective educator. Matt Miller from Ditch That Textbook put together 27 tips to delivering powerful professional development. I have provided a few of these tips below but the entire list can be seen by clicking here. 

  1. Customize professional development to their unique needs. 
    • Teachers are all different. Providing professional development to meet their unique needs will certainly help. Try to understand their pain points and speak directly to their struggles. 
  2. “They might forget what you said, but they won’t forget how you made them feel”.
    • Teachers should leave professional development opportunities feeling inspired or like they are a rockstar and can take on the world. The world needs more kindness and less judging so provide moments within your professional development opportunities to show teachers they are appreciated, capable, and knowledgeable. 
  3. Give them hands-on practice as much as possible. 
    • Teachers are just like students. They need to apply what they are learning right away. This is often difficult in a 60-minute session but try to go deep (sharing one tool including application) rather than wide (sharing 5 tools with no application). 
  4. Share all sides of a tech tool. 
    • Speaking of going deep, sharing all sides of a tech tool includes the student view, the positives, and the negatives of a tech tool. Teachers need to view all sides before they can make a knowledgeable decision about whether a tool is right for their classroom environment. 
  5. Be your own unique self. 
    • I love professional development sessions where the instructor is unique and fun and showcasing their talents. I have often thought about how fun it must be to be students in their classroom. Everyone has their own unique qualities. Be unashamedly you when delivering professional development sessions because you are amazing! 

Next Steps

Interested in learning more? Check out the websites below for great information. 

References:

All sourced information is hyperlinked as applicable above. 

TLDR (too long didn’t read):

Professional development, conferences, meetings, workshops, etc often get a bad rap for being boring and in-effective. I truly believe that professional development given correctly can drastically change a teacher’s career. I know that I have personally been positively effected by dynamic professional development workshops where passionate teachers shared their ideas, tips, and tricks to being a more effective educator. Matt Miller from Ditch That Textbook put together 27 tips to delivering powerful professional development. I have provided a few of these tips above but the entire list can be seen by clicking here. 

@hollandkaylah