Week 5 and 6 Reading Post As a third year teacher in U.S., professional development means a lot to me.

Its mandatory to complete 90 hours new teacher PD hours and 30 hours school PD hours besides that. This used to lead me wonder, so what is the importance of PD hours and where the concept comes from. Thanks to this and last weeks reading, I have a clearer understanding of the concept of teacher communities and different forms of professional development that exists. Week 5s reading mainly gives us a broad picture of what teacher community is, how it comes into being, and the impact of its success. Little (2002) dug into teachers learning community by comparing the different emphasis of reforms upon two schools whole school reform and department/subject reform. It is still uncertain about which strategy is a more countable vehicle for us to use after all the case studies according to the author. In Van Ess paper on Examing the development of a teacher learning community, there are three features of teacher learning communities, namely, collegial and collaborative interactions, participation and discourse norms and focus of an activity on teaching and student learning. To what I understand what the teacher communities are, I finally draw the key word learning. This word appears in all different articles so many times. Week 6s reading gave me two specific picture of professional development when it comes into detailslesson study and writing within teacher networks. I was lucky that I attended two circles of lesson study in my second year of teaching and thus after my own experience, got to understand and article better. What stated in the Lewis, Perry and Hurd article, increased knowledge of subject matter, increased knowledge of instruction, increased ability to observe students, stronger collegial networks, stronger connection of daily practice to long-term goals, stronger motivation and sense of efficacy, and improved quality of available lesson plans., I can agree more on all these. Since I worked with more experienced teachers, I learned the whole process of how a lesson can be improved. I benefit not only on that lesson, but it was inspiring to my latter lesson writings and brought me whole new perspective of how I may reflect and improve myself. I did have one concern that while the students are being observed by so many teachers, some of them might not act as they normally do. Therefore, the result may not be so accurate. Besides that, it is a perfect professional development chance that one can have. In Lieberman/Woods article, it emphasize on how vital it is for teachers to work collaboratively. For the past three years, I observe lessons by all different teachers. After the observation, I always discuss how the teacher comes up with the lesson and compare to the lesson if I am the person to teach. Moreover, we also had adobe meetings that teachers of a group 6 got to share the ideas or what works/not in their class, so everyone can learn and contribute to the issue. By these two weeks reading, I now understand why professional learning opportunities are provides, how they are framed and what they can bring to the teachers. I am currently has in school late start PD as well as online PD-PD 360, which I should make most out of them.