One of the questions that I had hoped to answer that I did not articulate is how do we get more teachers to participate in professional development. It is apparent that participation is not driven by extra pay. While teachers may not be participating in professional development offered by the district, many teachers do practice an ad hoc professional development on their own, through vehicles like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. My question would be how do we get our teachers in NVUSD to collaborate together? When I joined the PLC at Phillips it was clear that the culture of the school and the generosity of the members of the 4th grade PLC created a synergy that was supportive of everyone in attendance.
The same was evident in the 4th grade Community of Practice. The same attendees shared the same generosity of spirit and collaboration. It will be interesting to see what the survey that the leaders of the CoP distributed differs from the one that I sent out. I feel that it was a good start, although it needs to clarify its goals. It seemed more like a PLC on steroids, which is an idea that could gain traction and thereby create the collective efficacy that Hattie had shown to be very effective in the classroom.
As of today, I am still waiting for the data from last summer's workshop. My guess is that teachers struggled to get the professional development internalized in time for the school year to begin. That is why Promethean, Imagine Learning and Dreambox have had multiple webinars since school began.
My research revealed the importance of developing heutagogy as a necessary component of preparing students for the 21st century. This is a major re-direction away from the force-fed, direct instruction that created passive, compliant students that were not able to think for themselves. These are the very students that Sir Ken Robinson described as having lost their creativity. We have so much to do and we need to work together. Our students depend on us.