Organization of Professional Development
In my district we get 6 Professional Development days per year. Here’s how they break down:
4 – teacher autonomy (the teacher can choose how they spend their PD day) (September/May, October, November, February)
1 – local union day (May)
1 – Admin day (usually either September or May)
Typically the admin at the school will pick either the first professional day of the year or the last one and use it for school planning. My current admin prefers to use the last one of the year in order to plan for the next school year. The local union day is always the first Friday in May and we’re strongly encouraged to attend the workshops provided.
We’re lucky. We have the freedom to choose (autonomy) how we complete our professional development and there’s a lot of choice within the set parameters. We also run a teacher vote for attending Summer Professional Development days. In June our union reps will host a teacher meeting (usually at the beginning of a staff meeting) where the teachers will vote on wether or not the staff will attend the Summer professional development days. If the vote is “yes” then teachers can attend up to 2 professional development days in August. If a teacher chooses to take part in these, then they exchange them for 2 in-lieu days (November and February) where they don’t attend professional development workshops and have 2 extra days off during the school year (yay for taking care of your mental health on those days!).
Workshop subjects
The topics for workshops depend on a few factors. Does the day have a theme? For example, in October it’s the Provincial Specialist Association day (PSA day) and teachers typically attend workshops for their area of focus (primary, intermediate, French, Learning Assistance, etc). Other professional development days it totally depends on who has applied to present. Usually there’s a variety of workshops available but one thing I’ve noticed is that there is a lack of workshops that involve EdTech.
EdTech workshops
I’ve attended a few workshops regarding Education Technology and the major frustration with them is that they are short (90 minutes) and WAY too much is covered in the workshop. The presenter often is rushing through the content and you can’t keep up. Yesterday, one of my peers in my M.Ed class gave a presentation on a model for EdTech professional development that sounded fantastic (check out his proposal here). He proposed that in the workshop, the teachers participated like it was a mini lesson where he guided educators through specific ways to use Artificial Intelligence to reduce a teacher’s workload for non-teaching related tasks. Even just taking a quick look at Josh’s workshop plan (here) demonstrates how useful this workshop would be.
Final thoughts
Our plates are very full as teachers and if there are a few ways that I can reduce the amount of time it takes me to complete a task, without impacting the quality, then I’m definitely interested in learning more. For example, it usually takes me several days of work to plan a unit of study, I’m estimating about 12 hours (but probably longer if I include finding all of the resources, making the worksheets, and making the slide decks). If I can take this task from 12 hours to 2 hours by using tools like Josh has suggested, then I’m happy to learn. Especially since I teach 10 subjects a term and it takes me just as long to plan each unit and I usually have to plan multiple units per term.
References
New EdTech Classroom. (2020). How to Use Education Technology. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN1StZzlmbU
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