Dialogue 4 : Developing a Professional Development Program
Do you need help developing and implementing professional development systems that result in good teaching for all teachers?
In the traditional model, professional development is handled by only one or two people in a school, so there is no way get input from staff into the design of the plan and no systematic means of evaluating its implementation. Teachers feel that professional development has little to do with them and the problems they confront in the classroom.
CEP’s approach is to work with a leadership team to design a professional development plan that takes the whole staff into consideration. It’s impossible to implement a plan with one or two people working in isolation. You need a team that is willing to talk to teachers, ask them questions, incorporate their ideas, and then go back to see if the plan is working. In our PD model, team members work with teachers on a training plan in which everybody is hands-on.
The cycle of professional development is training, implementation, reflection, evaluation, debriefing and redesign. We help the team develop a comprehensive professional development plan that includes all of these steps and involves of all the teachers in a school. It is a systematic approach that requires a lot of communication among teachers, students and administrators. When teachers’ real issues are addressed in this way, effective teaching and successful learning becomes a goal that involves everybody.
See Our Approach