Journeys in Education
Ramblings on ICT, Education, Web 2.0, Christianity and Staff PD
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So I thought this blog would come in handy! Thought i would share my preliminary thoughts on the Professional Learning Goals Program that I am planning for next year. The assumption that I am making is that we expect our students to create learning goals and measure whether they have met them or not to help them become life long learners so why not teachers?? My scope is the development of teachers in ICT integration and use but I am hoping that is could be used for all areas of a teachers growth. So the plan thus far is by using a Ning staff will join a learning community within the school and post answers to a series of questions via a blog either on the ning or RSS’d (what is the past tense of RSS?) to their ning page on the goals that they would like to set for themselves.I will then meet with each staff member to help develop a plan of action to help them achieve their goals, which will include after school training sessions, external PD’s, readings, peer reviews, mentoring and joining a professional learning network. Staff will then need to blog their progress and reflections at least 4 times over the year (obviously they can do more but that will be the minimum) and to utilise the features of the ning to collect evidence of their achievements e.g uploading photos, videos, documents, commenting on other’s pages etc. (It is also a sneaky way to get staff to use some web 2.0 technology and hopefully begin some collaboration and conversations!) I will also meet with staff over the year to chat with them about their progress. Staff will be encouraged to set goals that are meaningful and relevant to their teaching and needs.
So I am hoping this will work and these are just my initial thoughts. I need to work out what will happen if staff don’t work on their goals at all. I need to work out what the questions will be. Anybody see any other glitches, flaws, suggestions needed???
October 29th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
Hi Lisa! I think it makes a lot of sense to have teachers create learning goals. I believe that our school is doing that as part of the new performance appraisal system coming in 2009. I’m hoping that there will be a separate ICT goal and not just a professional learning goal. I think the difficulty lies not with what you intend but with what your staff will actually do. I’m sure you have staff that are professional, committed, interested but also time-poor. There will be staff who will have valid reasons for why they didn’t quite get through their goal – “every time I tried, the network was down. It was really frustrating, and time wasting, so I gave up to concentrate on . . .”
Maybe I’m too cynical? I’ve been trying to get staff to use ICT differently before Web2 was around (as well as now) and it’s really frustrating. I keep trying to come up with new ways to enthuse them, but there are a number who just don’t see the potential.
I hope you have an administration that supports your program in more than just staff meeting times. Teachers need to be given additional time to try new things out.
Keep me posted . . . I’d love to see it work then perhaps I can try your approach.
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