Teachers Professional Development Guide: Must Have Tools and Resources. Education Week. Increasing student success through more rigorous content standards requires educators to refine and expand their practices to support deeper levels of student learning.
Teachers may need to expand their content knowledge, especially if curriculum changes require them to integrate concepts new to their grade level or previously not included in their classroom or course curriculum. Common Core standards call for instructional practices that have not traditionally been mainstream in classrooms. In addition, new evaluation systems include an expectation for specific, criteria-based feedback requiring anyone who supervises educators to expand their repertoire and skill set. These are just some of the changes that require highly effective, standards-based professional learning for those educators expected to implement them. Deciding whether and how to repurpose investments of funding, staffing, time, technology, and even material resources is never easy. Subjects - eLearningFeeds.com. Being a profession? It seems that almost every day this week in some forum or another I've heard reference to the need to 'recapture the profession' of teaching.
Is this the case? Is teaching no longer a profession? Have we lost the right to call ourselves professionals? This debate has been around for a long time and never seems to be fully resolved, and may never be as long as we have a situation where teachers and teaching is subject to so much direct political influence and interference. There is hardly a day goes by when we don't see teachers and/or teaching represented in a negative light by the media who seldom waste an opportunity to position teachers as "a problem to be fixed".
My thinking on this started last Friday when a speaker at a conference I was at made such a claim whne speaking to a group of APs and DPs from local schools. From the USA I read another article that made me think of the status of teachers. Students Achieving Engagement « Byron's Babbles. Back on December 9, 2011 my post was about action research we are doing at my school on student engagement.
I wrote about the four themes that our students developed about what great teachers needed to do to keep them engaged in the learning process. To read the post click here. Here are the themes from the student responses as to how students are best engaged: 1. Students learn best from Passionate and Energetic teachers; 2. Students learn best from teachers that are Prepared and Creative; Students learn best when the material is Relevant to them; and 4.
This past week we took two student LAB times (time each day I spend with the same group of students) to discuss the students’ role in being engaged learners. Here are the themes and every related comment made by the students: Proper Sleep Eat Breakfast Positive Attitude and Motivation Respect Responsibility and Work Ethic Commitment Active Involvement Google+ Just Because I Said It, Doesn't Mean They Learned It - Calgary, AB, Canada, ASCD EDge Blog post. This year, as I begin to understand and implement the notion of Instructional Leadership into my practice the saying, “Just because I said it, doesn’t mean they learned it.” seems to becoming more and more meaningful.
I find that with my staff, I am a great teller. I tell people all sorts of things everyday. However, in order to truly IMPROVE, and make noticeable gains with SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT, teacher practice has to shift. Teachers have to learn and grow; if they need to learn, one of my main roles is to teach them, not just tell them. Image via Wikipedia In study after study, the evidence is clear. “Two different comprehensive syntheses of research on the factors impacting student learning have come to the same conclusion: the most important variable in the achievement of students is the quality of instruction they receive on a daily basis (Marzano, 2003; Hattie, 2009). Simply improve teaching sounds simple enough. What is My Role in Improving Teacher Practice 1. 2.
Cover via Amazon 3. Another Tarnished Silver Bullet - Sayville, NY, United States, ASCD EDge Blog post - A Professinal Networking Community for Educators. How Social Media can Enhance Schools as Professional Learning Communities. The field of social media is a burgeoning area of communication, and one that educators cannot ignore.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Diigo, GooglePlus – these platforms for communication are not going to go away; and while there is a great deal of negative media surrounding their use, they can be harnessed to create myriad possibilities for schools as learning communities. Current research only proves the dominance of Social Media as a modern communication medium: This is the first of a series of posts planned in the area of social media and schools as learning communities. It is too big a topic to cover adequately in one post, and the value of social media tools as resources for learning is too great not to be addressed.
This post will consider what the term ‘social media’ connotes, and ways in which it may be used to overcome some of the obstacles schools face when attempting to develop a professional learning culture. Social Media – what do you need to know? Here’s how: 1. 2. 3. 4. Online Reproducibles.