EDUA 5872 Professional Development Practicum
PERSONALIZED PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PRACTICUM
How many times have you sat through a professional development session that had little to do with your professional situation or learning needs? Research tells us that differentiated instruction leads to positive outcomes in the classroom, and teachers are no exception to this idea. That’s why it’s so important to know that what you’re learning is relevant, useful, and worthy of your time. Personalized professional development allows you to customize your professional development to ensure that the content is meaningful to you and fuels your passion for the art of teaching.
In this course, you will have the opportunity to create your own personalized professional development experience. You’ll develop your own goals, learning objectives, learning methods, and timeline for pursuing the knowledge and skills you need most for where you are in your career. Using an ePortfolio to track your journey, you will curate and build highly practical artifacts that will help you in a way that is authentic to you and your teaching situation. In addition, you’ll develop methods for sharing what you learn with others. Reflect on these questions:
• What do you feel passionately about when it comes to teaching?
• In which area could you improve the most as a teacher? (This one can be hard to confront, but remember, you want to grow from this experience.)
• What trends have you noticed in education (pedagogy, content, behavior management) that inspire you? What trends concern you?
• Is there a unit that you would love to develop for your class? Perhaps a unit you have taught before that needs revamping or a completely new topic that supports the standards in your content area?
• Have you led (or will you lead in the near future) an extracurricular experience that you could use as inspiration for your professional development? Could you use your experience (for example, a trip with students to Washington, D.C.) to create a virtual experience for future students?
• Have you attended (or will you attend in the near future) a professional conference? Could you share that learning with colleagues?
By the end of this course, you will learn how to leverage learning experiences that are meaningful to you and create tools that you can start using in your classroom today.