Teachers: As you hit the ground running in September, you are focused on students and getting through daily tasks. District professional development offerings are rarely tailored to the specific needs of individual teachers. Here are five small and simple ways to build professional development into your daily routine. The results are cumulative. By the end of the school year, you will see how much you have grown if you implement and follow through with just one of these strategies.
1. Subscribe to convenience. Pick one or two areas of your interest (i.e. “history curriculum” or “technology integration”) and subscribe to Google Alerts. This will bring relevant web content to your email box daily or weekly. No time-consuming searching required. Set aside 10 minutes a day (or per week) to peruse your alerts.
2. Be a curator. When you stumble across and interesting web site but don’t have time to read it, you can simply bookmark it. Create a bookmark folder in your web browser that you can go back to at a later time and view. If you’re game for a more visual approach try Pinterest. For a more social approach, try Delicious. or even try tweeting links and archive them with Backupify. They all house and share content that you can delve into when you can or need to.
3. Join a PLC. Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) are all the rage these days—and for good reason: Communal professional development is like an upward (as opposed to downward) spiral based on the powerful principal of scaffolding. While you are learning about a particular topic or area of interest, you can implement it in your classroom, and then bring results back to your PLC for refinement and development. Whether your PLC is school wide or internet-based, it can be a tremendous source of ongoing support and fresh ideas for your classroom teaching. Edutopia offers some usefultips for establishing a PLC.
4. Start a blog.
Self-publishing on the web is a powerful and easy method for (re)developing your professional identity as a teacher because the process requires you to formulate your thinking. Make sure you keep your blog professionally focused. Do not just post reflective musings. Offer your readers helpful advice and resources. Blogging is another way to curate (archive) content and by doing so builds your professional portfolio along the way. Blogger is one of many free blogging services you can try.
5. Get a grip on your social (media) life.
We have become a fractured public with social media profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, EdModo, our school district LAN and let’s not forget the PLC you just started! It can be overwhelming, time consuming and not efficient. Select a home base and concentrate on that one. For example, Facebook allows you to collaterally use other social media channels (such as Twitter). Although Google+ allows you to manage your information streams a bit better than Facebook. Or your home base can be your PLC on Blogger, which allows you to push your posts out to a variety of social media channels. If you can’t give up any of your networks, sites like Hootesuite and TweetDeck allow you to manage your social media all in one interface.
Do you have PD strategies to share? If so, leave a comment below.
