What PD happens in your workplace? What strategies does your organization have in place to encourage development, change and innovation?
Professional development is the skills and knowledge a person gains during personal development and job growth. Fullan (1991) cited PD as “the sum total of formal and informal learning experience throughout one’s career”.
In a school organization, PD often happens in teaching training in an innovative environment during the technology usage. New teachers
are given PD that new teachers are teamed up with a "teaching partner" who has more experience in using ICT. Besides attending such academic training sessions, teachers also requires new information and ideas through sharing conferences or online discussions. In my university, school will arrange training seminar regularly in order to enhance their job capabilities.
In recent year, innovative technology has taken an important part in PD course. Unlike the traditional coaching approaches: observation, reflection, and action, many content providers have implemented discussion boards and collaborative websites to engage and facilitate interaction and enhance training effectiveness, which give learners a good example to use new information technology in teaching and learning. Also, teachers collaboration and vision sharing is important in maintenance of such learning community, and school also should focus on the provision of professional development to promotes the community.
To be honest, my school has not found a systematic management model in PD. According to the model from Newhouse et.al (2002) who give six conditions encountered during the process of PD, it is clearly to evaluate whether the strategies the school taken is appropriate for PD process.
Vision: leadership needs a clear vision of development, change and innovation for the guidelines of PD. School usually notices the decision to teachers through instructional policy or teaching conference, sometimes via staff email for small adjustment.
Skills: an innovative working environment needs staff to accept the new skills immediately. In school organization, teacher faces the challenge from technology adoption to support but also change the traditional instruction.
Incentives: motivation of learning new skills is the strongest power to drive the process of PD. School culture leads the spirit of the encouragement in developing, changing and challenging. A younger school often shows the enthusiasm of innovation and transformation.
Resources: physical instruments and training coaches are available during the development. School should give strong confidence to the local government and the sponsors in order to release its financial stress. Resources can use collaborative and interactive based on the website or databases.
Action plan: this can be connected with the vision but given a more detailed project of PD. School can teamed up a professional coach group to establish the local strategies.
Collegiality: distributed leadership causes the collaboration of leader and staff. The combination of top-down decision and bottom-up questioning will make the PD more effectively and collaboratively.
You demonstrate that, nowadays, innovative technology plays a important role in school. I am confused about how to train the older teachers who always feel a little difficulty to learn the new technology. Because, in my observation, I find that most of old teachers prefer to use the simply educational technology and spend more efforts on organizing the contents of the course.
ReplyDeleteYour question is also my worry about the ICT implementation to a school. Older teachers who may have more experience and good performance in teaching and learning are not willing to change their methods to adjust themselves to the innovative pedagogical environment. So to improve this situation, the innovative change needs to reform from foundation. I mean the revolution requires not only from technology adoption, but also from the culture transformation of a school. Actually it costs a long time for changing.
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