Ticket to Skip A Faculty Meeting

St. Patrick’s Episcopal Day School works hard to make faculty meeting time (and professional development time in general) an opportunity for customized learning and meaningful discussions and work. One knows a school is using this time well when one misses a session and—as I have done recently—regrets it rather than feeling like one has gotten out of jail free.

Image by West Midlands Police from West Midlands, United Kingdom (101 train ticket  Uploaded by palnatoke) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Given my experience teaching at others schools, though, I know that too many faculty meetings and professional development sessions are one-size-fits all lectures or activities that do not fully meet the individual needs of the teachers attending.

With all the attention that blended learning gets as an opportunity to improve students’ learning experiences, are we paying enough attention to opportunities for blended learning to improve teachers’ learning experiences and professional development? Clearly, universities are making strides. Over the past ten years, I have seen more and more colleagues pursue online or blended-learning master’s degrees. But are these changes inspiring the way schools approach the weekly faculty meeting or monthly teacher in-service day?

They certainly could. In addition to pursuing formal education online and in blended environments, many teachers take advantage of the informal learning opportunities online (Twitter and Edmodo, for example) and in-person and blended learning opportunities facilitated by online organizing (various approaches to Edcamp, for instance).

Could new apps help teachers demonstrate to their schools what they learned in these informal learning environments? If a teacher spent a weekend at an Edcamp exploring innovative ways to use iPads in the classroom, perhaps that teacher could show her administrators a badge she earned or progress she made in a professional-development learning management system (let’s call this a PDLMS). This might permit her to skip the generic district-wide iPad training session and instead to team up with other teachers who had also demonstrated iPad expertise. They could extend their learning and perhaps plan a project together. Maybe this progress could earn them another badge or PDLMS credit.

Schools like St. Patrick’s that already provide customized professional learning could use a learning badge system or PDLMS to further customize its approach. Perhaps teachers could receive personalized recommendations for upcoming webinars, online courses, Edcamp sessions, and conferences. Perhaps teachers could tap into a social network to find peers with specific interests or areas of expertise.

What’s in it for developers?

Building an online platform to helps teachers replace seat time in faculty meetings with credit for achievement in informal learning environments could help a developer gather useful data about where teachers seek informal learning opportunities and how schools spend their professional development time. The latter could be especially important from a business perspective because the decisions principals and superintendents make about how to spend in-house professional development time can reveal a lot about the priorities and needs of schools and districts.