Saturday, April 15, 2017

Improving Educators Professional Development Guides

By Anthony Harris


The standard of teaching must be improved in order for the improvement of education quality the students receive. Learning of new and more effective methods of teaching the students must be done in order to replace the old ones which tends to result in children learning lessons longer. This is the reason why professional development needs to be invested on.

But doing just any conference, training or seminars will assure you of having positive results from the teachers. They must be taught the right way so that they could easily learn and use these things in their classroom. Here are some improving educators professional development tips you could use in improving your teachers.

If you are discussing a teaching method during the session then use this to teach them about it to show them that it works. They will notice if you are using what you are teaching and failing to use it would send a message to them of it being ineffective and not worth replicating. But being able to use it in explaining the method will make it easier to follow and learn from you being the example.

Develop something which can be immediately used after they learned it and have them prepare a lesson plan that uses it in the next two weeks. Doing this would make them implement what they learned immediately in the classroom and have a colleague or administrator observe them. Waiting for an opportunity to implement it would probably make that opportunity disappear.

The feedback the observers will give will be used by the teachers in improving their methods in the next lesson. They could observe for their colleagues as well and give their feedback and discuss these things with each other to know what needs improvement. Doing this would enable them to help one another for the next lessons.

There must be a follow up for the things they have learned during the PD sessions. Failing to do so would make these sessions ineffective and a waste of time and money. There must be someone responsible in the staff to make sure the techniques learned are being used by teachers and would give feedback.

You must think about the long term vision of the school in choosing what technique to implement. This must not change after every few months or every year to avoid frustrating the teachers but instead something to be followed within at least two years. These things take time and practice to master and changing frequently would not achieve this.

The schedule of the sessions must be announced and known to all participating educators way ahead of time. Announcing it on the day itself is not a great and idea and would upset them because their schedules have to change. They have their own family to think about as well and this might result in them not focusing in the session.

Encourage them in helping each other by teaching what they learned. It could be done by grouping themselves and assigning one to teach a topic to others. Using online boards to share ideas is another way to do this as well.




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