Morphing Professional Development Design

Engaging teachers can be harder than engaging students. Their commitments to their students and planning and family and commuting and grading and everything else makes it very hard to command their attention.

And getting the most out of limited PD time leaves me struggling with how to reinforce good teaching strategies, work with the variety of attention spans and needs of adult learners and introduce exciting new tools all at the same time.

I've turned to a model lesson approach that leverages our learning management system, incorporates formative assessment, gives choices, and allows teachers to self-select their level of challenge. This way I can cram in many things at once and keep them engaged. It reminds me how much fun teaching is and how hard it is. Response to these lessons is really good, and evaluations are very positive.

I have used my LMS to organize a PD lesson with the following elements:

goals and objectives for the PD session

materials that can be accessed anytime

clearly defined times for each activity

required minimum completions for projects and more challenging reach elements

evaluation that allows everyone to see that they achieved something valuable

The key has been to model the LMS every step of the way, including embedding various tools for group discussion, formative assessment, embedding web tools, etc. The design of the LMS lesson was intense, but the payoff was amazing. It ran itself and the PD became largely self-directed. Of course that was the ultimate goal!