CEDU 521 - Week 5

What ongoing professional development is important for sustaining professional growth?

There is definitely no one correct answer to this question. To sustain professional growth, teachers and staff members must be willing to embrace, and districts must be willing to provide, many different professional development opportunities. Both formal and informal professional development opportunites, in and out of the school, should be used to improve the skills of the teachers.

Examples of these development opportunites include: inservice training days, continuing education classes, workshops, visits to other schools, regular collaboration within departments, joint lesson planning, peer coaching, and common planning times.

As far as what should be taught or discussed, it is important to offer opportunities in three different areas. First, content knowledge. Teachers should continuously be working at better understanding the subjects that they teach. Second, instructional strategies. Here is where I can fit my growing knowledge in the area of technology and use what I am learning in this cohort to develop new strategies to teach my students. Lastly, professional development needs to include providing teachers with knowledge about how our students learn and how to help them succeed in the classroom. Specifically with focus on EEN students, those with ADHD, our at-risk population, ELL, gifted and talented, can't forget about our EEN students on the PDD scale (they have their own special needs), students who have dealt with a death of a parent, those with substance abuse issues....wow, this list could go on and on - so I will stop. :)

Regardless of the type of professional development, it is clear that continuous learning by the teaching staff is critical to achieving our main goal of improving student learning.