Course Reflection

For this course we were given the chance to work from an administrative point of view. It was fun to put on my "Principal Hat" for a little while to design faculty meetings, professional development, and walk-through forms. However, I've also learned from this course that I'm happy being a teacher and stepping into an administrative role is not for me. At least not right now.

One of the assignments that I really enjoyed was designing a day of professional development to teach about digital learning in the classroom. It's only been a year since I sat down during our very first class of this cohort with hardly any knowledge of digital learning. So when I planned this PD it wasn't too hard for me to remember how clueless I was, which helped me select the resources and activities that I wanted to use. We've all had some pretty lack-luster PD experiences, so I wanted to balance out "sit and get" with "explore and try" as much as I could.

Professional Development Workshop Design

Another assignment that I thought was a lot of fun and informative was designing a faculty meeting. We have hour-long faculty meetings every week, which are hit-and-miss as far as engagement and new learning goes. However, those meetings are oftentimes the only chance that principals have to communicate ideas and initiatives to the entire staff at once (sometimes emails can be deleted without being read, you know) so fitting everything into one hour can be really difficult. That was my big realization when I designed my K-2 1:1 iPad rollout initiative as a faculty meeting. It was a challenge to include everything that I wanted to do.

Faculty Meeting Design

I'm so surprised that another course is already over! I'm excited to see what we'll be learning next!

Capstone Project

For our capstone project for this course we have been given the opportunity to plan real-life PD for our colleagues! We came up with our "big idea" as a group (helping our colleagues become more comfortable with using technology with students and pushing out of their comfort zone) and split up the responsibilities into subcommittees that everyone in the class could sign up for. 

While I'm still excited about this idea, there have been some struggles along the way. Although everyone in the class works in the same district and we're in the same cohort, not having ample time to meet face-to-face has been hard. We used time during our last class to get into our groups and get started with the planning, but then we found that when we came back together as a large group that we weren't all on the same page after all. While our big idea is the same, the way we want to get there is not. I'm part of the group whose responsibility is to plan out the professional development activities. The work of the other groups really depends on us getting our piece finished, but we don't feel like we have a clear picture of what we'd like to do so it isn't done yet. Technology can be used for collaborating and completing group projects, but it's also easy to push something aside to do later when you don't need to discuss it with someone face-to-face. 

In order to get this plan put into action, I think that we need to set a strict timeline for when each group's responsibilities should be completed by. It may also help for each group to have a leader who can be the point of contact between groups and help to rally the group members together to stay on track. 

Although we still have a lot to do in order to complete this PD, I can honestly say that this experience has already made me appreciate all of the work that goes into organizing and planning for Institute Days, Staff Development Days, and even simply staff meetings. There is a lot of work that needs to be done behind the scenes to make PD successful, and I'm glad that I've had the experience of seeing both sides of that now!