Professional Development Planning

To be able to be a fully functional technological school, there has to be an understanding of what the goal is. The entire district needs to know where they are going and why they are trying to get there. The importance needs to be apparent. This goal has to be known from the superintendent all the way to the students. The scary fact is that the students are the ones that are the experienced participants in this entire endeavor. So this leaves us in a plan, such as the Long Range Plan, that not only includes where the students need to be, but also where the teachers need to be. What the classroom needs to look like and all of the steakholders involved. Up to this point, professional development consisted of all teachers, k-12, all in one room, listening to a presenter and trying to figure out how to tie it into their curriculum and grade level. Teachers completed the StaR Chart and really never paid attention to how they were answering questions and how it would impact their school. Now we are realizing that although we were trying to say that we were using all of this technology in our classroom, the majority are still lost. The current state of the district needs to not only be known, but administrators need to allow teachers to know why. The TEKS for technology need to be known by each educator. They also need to be known by the students.
The professional develoment needs to be made specific for teachers in their specific areas. Teachers need to be able to immediately be trained and not just given a list of sites that they can go. It needs to be hands on and teachers need to know what is readily available to them. The data that is driving the decisions for improvement needs to be made known to each stakeholder. I also think that it is important for us to listen to our students. They are so much more literate then we are and we can learn a lot from them. It is important to follow up with teachers. They need to be contacted and have a technical support liason that they can contact when things go wrong. It is also important to have someone that is familiar with the make up of your staff when training.