The 5 principles of effective professional learning (Gulamhussein, 2013):
1. The duration of professional development must be significant and ongoing to allow time for teachers to learn a new strategy and grapple with the implementation problem.
2. There must be ongoing support for a teacher during the implementation stage that addresses the specific challenges of changing classroom practice.
3. Teachers’ initial exposure to a concept should not be passive, but rather should engage teachers through varied approaches so they can participate actively in making sense of a new practice.
4. Modeling has been found to be highly effective in helping teachers understand a new practice.
5. The content presented to teachers shouldn’t be generic, but instead specific to the discipline (for middle school and high school teachers) or grade-level (for elementary school teachers).
After my call to action, I created a professional learning plan outline using my BHAG and Fink's 3 column table. My goal with this plan is to introduce all teachers to what blended learning is and then give them an opportunity to sign up for a year long blended learning program. My audience for the remainder of the program would be those who choose to sign up for it. Through this program, learners (the teachers), would be able to earn some of their required summer comp days as well as all of the professional development points required by our district throughout the school year. These teachers would then serve as mentors to the teachers who sign up the following year.
The learners will spend the first few months just learning what blended learning is, the different types of models of blended learning, and observing other teachers from surrounding districts who already implement blended learning in their assigned subject. Since the program will start in February, this allows the learners time to learn about the strategy, see the strategy modeled in their specific content area, and then allows them to have the summer to figure out how it fits in their classroom and create the materials needed to do so. As a teacher there's nothing I find more frustrating then learning about a new strategy in the middle of the year and being asked to implement it with my students the next week after I've already got them in an established routine. Allowing the learners to have several months to prepare before the start of the next school year will prevent this frustration.
Check out the Professional Learning Outline below for a more detailed look at this plan. Resource links can be found in the last column of the outline. Please note that the resource links are still being tweaked and developed.
Gulamhussein, A. (2013). Teaching the Teachers Effective Professional Development in an Era of High Stakes Accountability. Center for Public Education. Retrieved from http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/system/files/2013-176_ProfessionalDevelopment.pdf