Leadership - Reimagine PD

Objectives: 

• • Engage as leaders in school or district-wide efforts to shape, advance, accelerate a shared vision of empowered learning.

  • Collaboratively lead efforts to present solutions and action plans to school/district decision makers

Reimagine PD

As a final project, our cohort collaborated to create a two-hour design session for school teams looking to design better professional development for their teachers.  We started with a focus on our own district which will be expanding time for teacher professional development.  Rather that see that time filled with a random collection of topics, we believe that through a guided design process that focuses on the key constituents, we can help the team design something that is inspiring and effective at helping teachers improve.  Once we started our work, we realized that the process and session were not specific to our district and could benefit many educators, prompting us to open the event to all schools.

My primary contributions were organizing the prompts and materials for the design thinking activities that we will lead participants through at the event.  Design activities are usually focused, interactive, and fast-paced with the intent of quickly pulling new ideas to the surface.  My hope is that, through these questions, templates, and this structure, the participants will find success in a user-centered design process and replicate it at home with their own users.

Reflection

I am excited for the Reimagine PD event because it synthesizes much of what we learned about leadership, influence, design, scrum, and teacher growth and applies that learning in a format that can benefit others locally and regionally.  It was complicated to pull together diverse ideas from a team of eight, but we strengthened each others' ideas and built an event that is purposeful and focused, not just a hodge-podge of various topics.

I am looking forward to feedback from participants especially those from our district, to see how effective our plans were in helping teachers and admin to think differently and put their users first.