Leading Professional Learning

LEADING PROFESSIONAL LEARNING

For professional learning to be effective, it must model the strategies that we want teachers to use in the classroom. The things we value for our students' learning must be what we also value for our teachers. If students need voice and choice, then teachers need voice and choice. If students need engaging learning experiences, then teachers need engaging professional learning experiences. This page describes practical strategies for you as a learning coach to provide engaging, teacher-centered, interactive learning experiences for your teachers.

Strategies for Facilitating Conversations

Facilitating meaningful conversations during professional learning sessions is an essential skill for technology coaches. By employing effective strategies, coaches can encourage participant interaction, foster a collaborative learning environment, and promote deeper understanding and reflection.

Here are some strategies for facilitating conversation:

Open-ended questions: Ask open-ended questions that encourage participants to think critically, share their opinions, and engage in thoughtful discussions. These questions typically begin with "how," "why," or "what" and promote a deeper exploration of the topic.
Wait time: After posing a question, allow for sufficient wait time before calling on a participant or moving on to another topic. This gives participants the opportunity to process the question, formulate their thoughts, and feel more confident in sharing their answers.
Encouragement and affirmation: Acknowledge and validate participants' contributions to the conversation, even if their answers are not complete or entirely accurate. This creates a supportive and inclusive atmosphere, encouraging more participants to share their thoughts.
Redirecting questions: If a participant provides an incomplete or unclear response, gently redirect the question to the rest of the group or ask follow-up questions to encourage further elaboration or clarification.
Utilizing group work: Divide participants into small groups to discuss questions or topics. Smaller group settings can help participants feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas, as they are less exposed than in a larger group setting.
Think-Pair-Share: After posing a question or presenting a topic for discussion, give participants a minute to think about their response, then have them pair up with a partner to discuss their thoughts. Finally, bring the group back together and ask pairs to share their insights with the larger group. This will help participants who are unsure formulate a response with a partner.
Paraphrasing: After a participant shares their thoughts, paraphrase their response to ensure understanding and encourage further discussion. This also demonstrates active listening and helps to create a sense of trust and validation among participants.
Non-verbal cues: Use non-verbal cues, such as eye contact, nodding, and facial expressions, to encourage participants to share their thoughts and to convey your interest and attentiveness to their contributions.

Strategies for Facilitating Questions

When participants seem hesitant to answer questions, technology coaches can employ additional strategies to encourage involvement and avoid the temptation to answer questions for the participants. These strategies can help create a supportive and inclusive environment where participants feel comfortable sharing their thoughts.

Break questions into smaller parts
If participants seem overwhelmed by a question or topic, try breaking it down into smaller, more manageable parts. This can make the question less intimidating and allow participants to focus on one aspect at a time.

Anonymous input
Encourage participants to submit their thoughts or responses anonymously, using tools like Google Forms, Padlet, or Mentimeter. By eliminating the fear of judgment, participants may be more willing to share their ideas. The technology coach can then review and discuss the responses as a group without revealing the individual contributors.

Assign roles
Assign specific roles or tasks to participants during discussions or group activities, such as a note-taker, question-asker, or summarizer. By giving each participant a defined role, they may feel more invested in the conversation and more inclined to contribute.

Share personal experiences
As the technology coach, share your own experiences, successes, and challenges related to the topic. This can help create a more relatable and comfortable atmosphere, encouraging participants to open up and share their own experiences.

One-on-one support
If some participants remain hesitant to participate in group discussions, consider offering one-on-one support during breaks or after the session. This can provide a more comfortable environment for them to ask questions or discuss their thoughts privately.

Strategies for Interactive Learning

Access to just-in-time resources can help catalyze growth, provided that those resources meet the educator’s most immediate needs. Differentiating your approach to resource sharing will ensure that teachers are neither overwhelmed by nor starving for resources. As teachers and coaches work together to harness the best of what technology has to offer, it can not be overstated that learning must come first. Technology is a tool to support, enrich, extend, clarify, and personalize the experiences of learners but it is learning that drives technology, rather than the other way around.

Speed Dating

Speed dating takes its name from "speed dating"- a process in which couples meet briefly and exchange information to determine if there is interest in dating the person they are talking to. In professional development, speed dating allows you to quickly sift through ideas to find strategies and ideas that may or may not work for you within a super-fast context. This forces participants to think and speak concisely and listen with intent. It's also a great form for sharing! Click here to learn more about Speed Dating.

Fishbowl

Fishbowl is a strategy for organizing medium- to large-group discussions. Students are separated into an inner and outer circle. In the inner circle, or fishbowl, students have a discussion; students in the outer circle traditionally listen to the discussion and take notes. A preferred method is to have students in the outer circle also participate in the discussion on a backchannel. This gives students who are uncomfortable discussing in front of a group, an opportunity to add to the discussion. Click here to learn more about the Fishbowl strategy.

Choice Boards

Choice Boards and Learning Menus give teachers options for Professional Learning. Multiple sessions or a variety of sessions are offered with the expectation that teachers complete a certain number of a given amount of time in PL. Click on the links below to access example choice boards and resources. Click here for more information on choice boards in general.

Jigsaw

A jigsaw is an interactive way for a group to be able to get a lot of information from resources in a shorter amount of time. One way to implement the jigsaw strategy is to:

Divide the total number of participants are divided by the number of articles you have OR divide a long article up into the number of needed sections for each participant of the group (ideally around four).
Each person reads a different article/section of the article and then reports out to the group about what they read and any ahas they had from the reading.

Read how this works in a classroom and adapt to your coaching situation on jigsaw.org or read about jigsaw activities at Cult of Pedagogy here.

15-Minutes to Learn

So, what do you do in a 15 minute PLC meeting? How do you make an impact in that short of time. In a 15-minute PLC meeting, technology coaches can still introduce a technology and create an engaging and impactful learning experience for the educators. Here are some specific examples of activities that can be conducted within this limited timeframe:

Lightning Talks
Prepare a series of short, focused presentations (2-3 minutes each) on various aspects of a technology tool or platform. Deliver these presentations in a rapid-fire format, allowing educators to gain a quick overview of the tool and its potential applications in their classrooms.

Interactive Polling
Utilize an online polling or survey tool (e.g., Mentimeter or Poll Everywhere) to gather real-time feedback from educators on their familiarity with a technology tool, their interest in learning more about it, or potential classroom applications. This activity can help spark interest, gauge the group's knowledge level, and inform future professional learning opportunities.

QR Code Exploration
Create a set of QR codes linked to short video tutorials, articles, or other resources related to a specific technology tool. Distribute the QR codes to educators and provide time for them to scan the codes using their smartphones or tablets and explore the resources. Encourage participants to share their discoveries with the group.

Collaborative Brainstorming
Introduce a technology tool, and then ask educators to brainstorm ways it can be used in their classrooms. Use a digital collaboration tool like Google Jamboard or Padlet to collect and organize their ideas in real-time. This activity encourages creativity, collaboration, and helps educators envision how the technology can be applied to their teaching practices.

Mini-Challenge
Present a brief, hands-on challenge related to the technology tool, such as creating a simple interactive quiz using Kahoot or a quick multimedia presentation using Adobe Spark. Allow educators to work in pairs or small groups to complete the challenge and share their results with the group.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse