Kelley Ouradnik

Continuous Professional Learning Culture

EAD-513
February 25, 2020

Relevance and Worthiness

Bowman County School District follows the Continuous Improvement Plan when

developing and deciding on professional development. The school’s goals are created with the

mission and vision statements in mind. Through the accreditation process, information is

gathered and evaluated and “a thorough report gives you both a broad understanding and detailed

insights into where your school or system excels and where you need to invest resources”

(Cognia, 2020). The information from this process is used by the Leadership Committee and

administration to create the professional development plan. This ensures “PD is valued” (Briggs,

2018, para 4). Much of the professional development includes the entire staff, although

individual staff do attend workshops, approved by both leadership committee and administration,

and they are required to bring back helpful information to our school and present.

Sharing Professional Learning

Office 365 is a service the state of North Dakota subscribes to, including all education

entities. It provides a suite of services including office applications, web-based and mobile apps,

Skype, SharePoint and cloud storage. The Microsoft Teams app is the hub

for team collaboration. The Teams app integrates teachers, information, and tools the school

staff can use to be more engaged and organized. It is “a seamless platform that not only

streamlines your teaching workflow, but also makes it possible for you to create a space for more

robust collaboration between your students” (Gonzalez, 2018, para 3) and staff. In Teams, there

is an additional app, OneNote, where a content library can be created and shared. Information,
including videos and websites can be embedded to share as resources. There is also video

conferencing which allows for satellite sites to participate in meetings.

Implementation

Teams has a conversation tab where staff can communicate and ask questions. You can

also message individual staff. I would have sections for each of the school’s goals and after in-

service or training, I would have teachers upload lesson plans and/or activities they have done in

their own classrooms to share with the entire staff. This will not only pass ideas throughout the

grade levels, but it will make teachers be held accountable to try newly learned strategies.

Feedback and Time Frame

Office 365 also has an app called Forms. This is a simple way to create surveys and send

them to staff. Surveys give valuable information and allows everyone has a voice. This is also

an app that students can utilize as well. Asking for feedback from the students is a way to gauge

the effectiveness of tools and techniques learned during professional development and offer

insight to make improvements.

New knowledge needs to be put into practice. Our professional development is a process

as we are working on school wide goals. The leadership committee designs monthly trainings to

enhance teachers’ knowledge and skills to help the school reach the CIP goals. Each month,

upon completion of training, teachers focus on skills learned, working together in smaller groups

in weekly PLC meetings. Monthly documentation (data) and/or lesson plans will be added to the

applicable goal, trying new strategies/information in individual classrooms. PLCs would focus

one week a month to evaluate training and implementation and share the information with
building principal. The principal will take the information to the school leadership committee

for further discussion.

Rationale

Teacher in-service is an important step for growing and nurturing staff. It is important to

shower teachers with information as a downpour gives a feeling of drowning. Teachers can

become overwhelmed. It is also to be mindful of the ‘One and Done’ trainings, as these are time

spent in training, but they are not effectively implemented into the classrooms. Darling-

Hammond, Hyler, and Gardner (2017) state “Effective professional development provides

teachers with adequate time to learn, practice, implement, and reflect upon new strategies that

facilitate changes in their practice. As a result, strong PD initiatives typically engage teachers in

learning over weeks, months, or even academic years, rather than in short, one-off workshops”

(para 20). Professional development needs to align with school wide goals and needs to be

continuous. It is important to focus on having staff accountability when staff leave the training

session. “No Matter how good the training is, adding connection capabilities like chatting and

file sharing always strengthens it” (Briggs, 2018, para 7). Once training is complete, teachers

will be able to connect through Microsoft Teams to discuss, share and evaluate new strategies

and/or information. Asking teachers to evaluate and reflect on professional development, may

look like more work for teachers, but providing PCL times to work in Teams will be helpful.

Teachers will also use this time to look over others’ teaching practices and can pick up insightful

information to apply in their own classrooms.

 References

Briggs, L. L. (2018). 7 ways to maximize professional learning: Take advantage of technology to

help teachers advance. District Administration, 54(9), 84.

Cognia (2020) Accreditation and Certification. Retrieved from:

https://www.cognia.org/services/accreditation-certification/

Darling-Hammond, L, Hyler, M, Gardner, M (2017, June 5) Effective Teacher Professional

Development. Learning Policy Institute. Retrieved from:

https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/effective-teacher-professional-development-

brief

Gonzalez, J (2018, Aug 8) Build a Collaborative Classroom with Microsoft Teams. Cult of

Pedagogy. Retrieved from: https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/microsoft-teams/