6.1 Identify and plan professional learning needs

Continual learning is an integral part of my commitment the profession of teaching. I share the vision of Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australian want to help all students become successful learners. To do this, I must continue learning and making positive changes to my classroom practices. Professional development leads to changes in both student outcomes and teacher beliefs and attitudes towards students, which reinforces better classroom practices (Guskey, 2002). To continue my learning as a teacher, I must be proactive and choose suitable resources to learn from.

I constructed my personal learning network (PLN) (Figure 1) by considering a range of digital and analogue resources, professional development courses and relationships from which I can use to develop professionally. I included resources I am currently using as well as resources I have learned from my teacher training and peers that I would like to use in the future. I have visually displayed them as a mind map using Coggle, a shareable, online mind-mapping tool. The advantage of Coggle is that it can be used with little user-training, supports images and links, sharable to other Google accounts and free. I also use this tool to make mind-maps for notes, and it is suitable for students too.

Figure 1. My person learning network.

I use variety of resources because they contribute differently to my learning, classroom practice and student learning. I use a variety of knowledge building and authoritative sources of information to expand my knowledge of my content knowledge. Having a greater breadth and depth of content knowledge allows me to make the class content more engaging for students. For example, when I was preparing to teach optics to Year Eight science students, I had access to the textbook which had concise factual explanations but no historical context about the topic and the students would get bored when using it in class – so I investigated other resources. These included:

• Let There Be Light: The Story of Light from Atoms to Galaxies by Ann Breslin and Alex Montwill (Popular Science Book). This book contains explanations of the science and mathematics of light in a way that is understandable to a general audience. I used this to deepen my understanding of the science of optics and develop ways of explaining it to students.
• ·BBC Radio 4 In Our Time – Optics (Podcasts). This podcast contained interviews with academics about optics, I learned more about the history of the science from a global perspective.
• A range of YouTube videos about light (Figure 2) and optics demonstrations that I used to develop practical activities for students.
• My mentor teacher – By discussion what I had learned from other resources I could clarify my understanding, get feedback and share my ideas.

Screenshots of presentation slides influence by these resources from my PLN are shown in Figure 3. As a result of using these resources and developing my knowledge. I was able to incorporate a global perspective on optics into my class, make the science easier for students to understand and add practical activities to my classes.

References

Guskey, T. R. (2002). Professional development and teacher change. Teachers and teaching, 8(3), 381-391.