The final frontier: Engaging and useful professional development - LIBE477 Reflection on meeting the ICT needs of teachers

To boldly go where no educator has gone before.

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Teacher-librarians have always been the vanguard of teaching Information and Communication Technology (ICT) skills, helping colleagues to integrate new technologies into classrooms and guiding our students toward becoming digitally literate citizens.  The wonderful teacher-librarians I've worked with (shout out to Joanne and Katherine!) were always so generous with their time and effort to help those of us lacking a technological skillset.  Because I lacked confidence with my technological prowess, when I became interested in using infographics as a way to demonstrate students' knowledge rather than the traditional research paper or poster presentation, they helped me to create lessons on the skills needed to create infographics, including researching, citing, summarizing and using infographic websites that allows one to design an original infographic.

Working with my school's teacher-librarians while developing the infographic lessons was like being coached.  They were beside me every step of the way making suggestions for activities and resources, helping me to fine-tune the approach.  Where I had originally wanted to create a list of credible websites, they gently suggested having students evaluate credibility of sources as a part of the assignment.  Where I had originally envisioned photocopying a chart where they would list their sources, they helpfully directed me toward online citation tools. With their ICT expertise, they were able to guide me and show me the best technology resources for the skills I wanted my students to develop.

What made this professional development experience so useful was the one-to-one help they were able to provide.  As the Edutopia article "The Importance of Choice of PD" points out, face-to-face instructional meetings are so useful because "effective instructional coaching is all about differentiating support for the variety of needs of teachers."  Personalized or differentiated professional development is essential to keeping professional learning meaningful and useful.  We all have experienced mandated professional development sessions that was not high quality.

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But, whole group professional development doesn't have to be disengaging. While it's not a secret that Professional Development sessions can fall short of expectations, there were definitely times when presenters have offered wisdom that changed my teaching practice for the better. In my experience, the best professional development came from presenters who were fellow teachers simply sharing ideas or resources that worked in their own classrooms, and who presented it in a way that I could see how I could use immediately in the classroom.  Some of my best professional learning happened during brief lunch hour meetings. Similar to the "Lunch and Learn"  or Edcamps recommended in the Edutopia article, my former English department would occasionally get together and share ideas, lessons and resources and these informal sessions were invaluable for how they positively impacted my teaching practice.

In addition to providing one-to-one "instructional coaching" and larger group professional development sessions, I feel that teacher-librarians should continue to curate a "professional collection" of print resources for staff members, as that is how I first discovered the excellent resources for teaching reading from Kelly Gallagher and fabulous lessons on writing from Nancy Atwell.  However, it is also important to recognize that there are also many online resources that are valuable for professional learning.  As I've mentioned in previous blogposts, I've found that education blogs such as Mindshift and Cult of Pedagogy can be a source of inspiration and fresh ideas for improving one's teaching practice in many areas including digital skills.  It may take some more though, but perhaps establishing a teacher "book club" that meets (online or in real life) to discuss quality education blog posts.  Another idea might be to curate a collection of blogs or accounts to follow and share them with staff members via Twitter.

Whatever method teacher-librarians choose to share their knowledge and skills with teachers and students, it is important to make it personalized so that it is engaging, useful and meaningful.

Professional development that is engaging, useful and meaningful? Make it so.

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Wolpert-Gawron, Heather. "The Importance of Choice in PD." Edutopia, October 30, 2018. https://www.edutopia.org/article/importance-choice-pd