Tips for Maintaining Consistent Professional Development Collaboration

 Professional Development is a great way for teachers to advance skills, learn about technology tools, and develop instructional strategies to maximize student learning. Many teachers may view professional development collaboration simply as required sessions each semester, however, it is beneficial to strive for professional development collaboration to be an everyday activity. The summer months are a great time to plan new PD strategies to prepare to the new semester.

How to Consistently Seek Professional Development Collaboration in Your School

We were able to talk with former principal and CEO of Gomo Ed Services, Dr. Josue Falaise (@josuefalaise), to learn about his suggestions for how to maintain consistent professional development throughout the year.

Evaluate Your School’s System for Professional Development Collaboration

Beginning with an overview of your school’s current processes for professional development collaboration is a great way to begin this evaluation process. Understanding the process your school uses will help when adapting this system to an everyday structure. 

When evaluating his school’s system for professional development, Dr. Josue found that his teachers look at Professional Development through a curriculum lens. Looking at the big picture, he then broke his school’s PD system into three questions that teachers can use to evaluate their progress daily. 

These three questions are:

1. What do we want students to know?
2. How do we know when they know it?
3. What do we do if they still don’t understand it?

Create a Professional Development Collaboration Action Plan Equipped with Expectations and Goals

After evaluating your school’s current system for professional development, it will be easier to highlight expectations and goals for the semester and the entire year. 

Dr. Josue gave an example of one teacher who shared her goal of going green during a faculty meeting. She wanted to use her time during professional development collaboration to spread awareness of her goal to transition paper assessments into online tools like Google Forms. By sharing this goal, this teacher gained support from others and was able to achieve her goal. 

Encouraging frequent conversations about your goals and expectations during a professional development meeting can motivate change and growth within your school. 

Continue to Reevaluate Your School’s System and Goals dealing with Professional Development Collaboration

Once you have evaluated your system and set goals, an important step for continual professional development collaboration is re-evaluation. 

A great example of how important re-evaluation is to professional development is the sudden change to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is important to understand how your goals and expectations for PD might have changed during this transition to remote learning to continue professional development collaboration.

Continual professional development collaboration is important for discovering new and successful growth tactics. Some easy tips to make this a continual process include evaluating your school’s system, creating an action plan with goals and expectations, and following up with revaluation of these system and goals. 

Listen to full conversation with Dr. Josue Falaise

On this episode of Tackling Tech Podcast, powered by Dyknow, Brett McGrath talks with Dr. Josue Falaise about building professional learning communities with teachers and students who are digital citizens and also ensuring cultural competency within K12 school systems.