CREATING EFFECTIVE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR EDUCATORS

Wondering how you can deliver professional development sessions that not only inspire educators to make changes when they see the relevance in what you are proposing, but that also provide them with the means to implement change? Follow the simple steps below!

1. State Your Vision and Goals

For any professional development you plan to offer, you should always start by writing out your vision for the session and asking yourself what knowledge and skills educators should walk away with after leaving your session. The clearer you are about what you would like to achieve, the easier it will be to plan a well-thought out and focused session.

2. Merge Visions and Goals

 
In addition to thinking about your own vision and goals, it’s always a good idea to do a little investigative research on your audience by browsing through the school websites of those who will be in attendance or by asking educators to complete a quick survey to learn about their visions and what their goals may be. With this information you can think of ways to merge both yours and your audience’s vision to ensure that any session offered is tailored to meet the needs of educators in attendance.

3. Create Individualized Tools

With a clear vision for your session, the next step is to create the tools to support your audience in their learning – will this be in the form of planners, a handbook, online resources, etc.? For every tool developed, you must not only think about that tool’s objectives, but also of how to individualize it by ensuring that whichever learning tool you offer is differentiated and/or scaffolded to accommodate differences in teaching roles (mainstream, specialist, support staff), different levels of teaching experience or knowledge of the topic you are presenting on, different grade levels, etc. This may mean making multiple versions of whichever tools you are planning to offer.

4. Plan Your Session

 
The last step before offering your professional development is to plan it out. Because your objectives are clear, you understand your audience’s needs, and you have your learning tools in place, this will be a fairly easy process! To ensure that your session remains focused, that there is a balance and clear connect between your talking points and time for educators to collaborate, and that your session is individualized, a planner similar to the one below can help you organize your thoughts.

5. Provide Ongoing Support

All too often, educators walk away from professional development and fail to make changes at their school or in their classrooms because there is a lack of follow up after the training is over. To avoid this common pitfall, it’s a good idea to have a plan in place for how you will support your audience after the session, which doesn’t necessarily mean a second session will need to be offered – this can be done via email, by setting up a group chat platform on your website for educators to support each other, via Zoom calls, etc. It doesn’t have to be much, but knowing that a platform does exist for questions to be answered will make it more likely that educators will buy into implementing your ideas!

Do you have any other tips you would like to share for running effective professional development? We’d love to hear them!

Further Reading

How to Create Brochures for Your School
How to Run a Conference at a Small School Without an Initial Budget
The Problem With Current Professional Development and How to Solve It
How to Use Planners as a Tool for Mentoring Teachers