Life-Long Professional Learning
Life-Long Professional Learning
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Life-long professional learning is essential for teachers to continue to be effective and provide the best possible learning experiences for students. Education is always changing; every year there are new strategies, new technology tools, new curricula, new school focuses, new teams and meetings, and more, and teachers are required to continue adapting their professional practice with each new thing. According to the GAPSC Standards for Personalized Learning, a teacher can "perceive his/her learning as a life-long pursuit" by participating in professional learning communities and networks, keeping up with emerging strategies and technologies, and seeking and creating opportunities to promote personalized learning (2019).
In a personalized learning setting, teachers play many roles for their students, including: communicator, connector, advisor, assessor, curriculum planner, and classroom facilitator and coach (Hanover Research, 2013). In order to effectively act in all of these roles, teachers can learn from professional learning opportunities and grow in their professional practice. Many educators feel some pushback towards professional learning, but we have to change our mindset about these opportunities. Even though everything is always changing, we can view this as a positive thing and change our mindset to look at professional learning opportunities as a way to make ourselves better rather than because we aren't good enough and we need to improve (Rowell, 2022).
Just as we provide our students with multiple ways to engage with the content, there are multiple ways for teachers to engage with professional learning. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district's team created a resource that provides four types of experiences (virtual, in-person, job embedded, and on-demand) with ten ways in which teachers can participate in professional learning opportunities, including but not limited to: Twitter chats, face-to-face meetings, podcasts, toolkits, and coaching (n.d.). According to Hanover Research, professional learning in a personalized learning setting should occur in a collaborative group setting through a learning community (2013). Professional learning communities are a great way for teachers to engage with other teachers, leaders, etc., They can consist of local groups such as a grade levels or content areas within schools, within districts, or within the state, or they can consist of global groups of educators around the world who have the same goals. Professional learning communities, also known as "PLCs", engage in a constant cycle of learning in which they analyze data, set goals, learn individually and collaboratively, and implement and adjust practices (Miller, 2020).
PLCs are an effective way to collaborate with a larger group of educators, administrators, instructional coaches, and more, but one often overlooked form of professional learning is through the observation of teachers in their own school building. An effective way to have teachers conduct observations is with a "pineapple chart" in which the chart represents one week and is broken down by class period, and teachers can write their name in any box in which they want to open their door to observations (Gonzalez, 2016). Teachers can volunteer to go observe another class and administrators or other teachers can provide coverage for them to do so if it doesn't coincide with their planning time. A lot can be learned through these pineapple observations, and teachers can end up gaining more knowledge and ideas than they went in to observe for. For example, a teacher may have gone in to watch a teacher use a new technology tool, but they end up liking the way a teacher used questioning or how they organized their lesson for the day, so they come away with unexpected new things to try in their own classroom. This works as a PLC within the school, but the voluntary nature of it provides more ownership for the teachers in what and how they utilize from the pineapple chart.
Participation in Professional Learning Communities
Participation in Professional Learning Communities
This is a screenshot from my Twitter account. I use Twitter as a global professional learning network (PLN) to connect with other educators and professional organizations in order to keep myself up to date on current practices, strategies, technology tools, and more. The tweet that I retweeted above is about more ways to incorporate executive functioning strategies within a personalized learning environment. Twitter is a fantastic resource for learning more within the realm of education, because experts routinely share new ideas and they are easily accessible for teachers.
My current school is a bit different and not a traditional school. Each teacher teaches something different, because I am at a Career Academy. Plus, I am the only Latin teacher in the district, so I don't have a counterpart to meet with in Houston County. However, even though we are all different, we all work weekly in a PLC to ensure that we are utilizing our time with our students for shared goals. We have discussed appropriate strategies and tools for different purposes (assessment, project-based learning, etc.) as well as data from specific pathways or the whole school for the purpose of identifying problems and implementing solutions. To the left is a picture of a PLC agenda in which I introduced half the faculty to Gimkit (the other half had another day) and made sure to mention how it could be used for personalized learning in addition to best practices for technology use in the classroom.
One way I keep up with what other Latin teachers are doing is through Facebook. There are many Latin-related groups, but I have gotten a lot of good ideas as well as shared a few of my resources from the "Latin Teacher Idea Exchange" and "NACCP - Cambridge Latin Course" groups. These virtual PLCs are a great way for Latin teachers, who are usually singletons at their school, to share ideas and ask for help when needed. Project ideas are shared, questions about incorporating cultural topics are asked, problems with curricula are discussed, and more, and they have been a wealth of information and new perspectives for me.
The post to the left actually was about brainstorming ideas for scaffolding Latin stories, which led to some talk about adaptive assessment, an element of personalized learning, by adding to the sentences gradually and seeing how students did as the sentences got more complicated.
Promoting Personalized Learning
Promoting Personalized Learning
I have been utilizing this Personalized Learning Portfolio to promote personalized learning. I have shared ideas about incorporating personalized learning within my network of teachers, and whenever they need further explanation or ideas, I send the link to my portfolio so we can talk through it together. The teachers in my building are more aware of what personalized learning is and are beginning to incorporate it into their classrooms. Among the teachers I have been sharing with, the two most common standards they have started with for personalized learning implementation are executive function and dynamic communication, and the consensus is that teachers are more comfortable adjusting their classroom styles for those standards over others.
One of the pathways within Houston County Career Academy is Teaching as a Profession (TAAP). I have kept the TAAP instructor in the loop because she has been looking for even more strategies, tools, and ideas to help her students prepare to go into a teacher preparation program in college and then into the classroom after that. I created a mini presentation to teach her the basics what personalized learning is, and she has plans to incorporate a mini unit on personalized learning next school year in her classes. Furthermore, our TAAP instructor is working on her Specialist's degree, and whenever they have to make suggestions within their discussion boards, she has incorporated elements of personalized learning, so through my promotion of personalized learning, it has spread to others outside of my PLN!
I have used my professional Twitter account to share some of the resources I have created regarding personalized learning with others in my PLN. The tweet to the right is promoting an artifact that I created about utilizing technology tools within a personalized learning classroom. I hope that other teachers will be able to benefit from what I have learned throughout this endorsement program as well as what I continue to do with personalized learning in the future.
In addition to sharing my own resources with others, I retweet effective strategies that I see for personalized learning to further promote others' ideas about personalized learning as well.
References
References
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. (n.d.) Personalized digital learning. https://sites.google.com/cms.k12.nc.us/cmspdl/home?authuser=0
Georgia Professional Standards Commission. (2019, January 15). GAPSC standards for personalized learning.
https://www.gapsc.com/Rules/Current/EducatorPreparation/505-3-.108.pdf?dt=%3C%25
Gonzalez, J. (2016, September 25). How pineapple charts revolutionize professional development. Cult of Pedagogy.
https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/pineapple-charts/
Hanover Research. (2013, November). Professional development for personalized learning practices.
https://www.hanoverresearch.com/media/Professional-Development-for-Personalized-Learning-Practices.pdf
Miller, A. (2020, January 3). Creating effective professional learning communities. Edutopia.
https://www.edutopia.org/article/creating-effective-professional-learning-communities
Rowell, L. (2022, January 20). 3 keys to evolving as a lifelong learner. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/3-keys-evolving-lifelong-learner
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