One of my New School Year Resolutions is to do a better job at structuring a cohesive year-long plan for our professional learning. Last year, we had so many things on our plate that many of our faculty meetings were discussions of "O.k., that just happened… how do we want to deal with it?" Moreover, I learned a lot about myself, primarily, that when I feel overwhelmed, I’m not as good at delegating, and I’m not as good at planning collaborative workshops. So, given that we’re on the edge of a two week stretch of professional development and workshopping, now would be a good time to think about how we want to look ahead in our own development as educators.

I’d been struggling with our PD priorities, both for our workshop next week and for the year. I saw a bunch of "stuff" I knew we wanted to do, but it felt very disconnected, and trying to prioritize any of it, or even figure out how I would want to structure it, was frustrating me.

Then, as I was prepping to do some introductory UbD work with the new to SLA faculty, I found a document in the UbD Workbook that talked about how to structure a UbD Unit (how very meta….) But that was the light bulb for me. I used a modified version of the UbD process to structure my thinking about SLA PD. Here were some of the questions I asked myself:

• What were the "big ideas" / units of study that I felt were most important for SLA growth this year.
• What were the goals and understandings that stemmed from those big ideas?
• Do the disparate ideas about PD for the year all fit into a goal or understanding?
• Looking at the understandings, what other ideas for workshops / readings / etc are suggested?

I’m not through the process yet — I think it will be evolving all year, but this makes me feel great about next week’s plan, and it makes me feel like I’ve got a framework for the year that I can come back to when I’m feeling at loose ends. Mmmm… structure.

With that, here’s the outcome of the process so far:

Big Ideas:

Curriculum Design

21st Century Learning

Humanistic Education

Goals / Understandings:

Understanding of Personal / Professional Learning Environment & How that Translates to Teaching and Learning

Understanding that Teaching and Learning is Networked

Deep Understanding of UbD Process and why backward design can improve educational planning

Understanding of how to create an environment where every student feels invested and cared for.

Exposure to and understanding of Web 2.0 / Read/Write Web Tools and how to leverage them in class.

Understanding of our core values and how to translate them into classroom practice

Understanding of state / district standards and how to align SLA’s curriculum with them.

Understanding that we need to prepare students to be 21st Century citizens in a world we cannot predict.

Getting Specific:

CSAP Workshops

Advisory

Understanding by Design

• Unit Planning / Stepping Through the basic UbD process
• Facets of Understanding
• Peer Review / Personal Revision
• Assessment Strategies

Interdisciplinary Work — Essential Questions / Thematic Work

Read / Write Web / New Literacy

• Advanced Moodle
• Drupal / DrupalEd
• Using Wikis in the Classroom
• RSS / RSS in the Classroom / RSS as an assessment aide

Mapping SLA’s Curriculum to the State Standards

ILP Monitoring — 10th grade Advisory workshop

Writing Across the Curriculum

• Using the SLA Rubric as a writing tool.
• SLA "Style Guide" for writing

Benchmark Project Alignment –> Ensuring similar assessments in quarters –> Mapping Benchmarks

Needed Meeting Time:

Tier II CSAP Meetings

Grade Level Meetings

Discipline Area Meetings

Advisory by Grade Level Meetings

Narrative Writing Time

There’s a lot that’s not on this list… for example, we don’t spend a lot of time on teaching strategies in workshop. They’ll get mentioned and talked about as part of the UbD process, but that’s more something that we work on individually and informally. This is also still very much a "list" not a plan, but it’s a list that has grown from specific priorities, and now the plan is easier to see. I’m feeling good that we can work from this, still be flexible when need be, and be productive. What’s even better is that this feels like a learning list to me. It feels to me that these are priorities that will help us grow as educators which will then, in turn, only help the growth of our kids.

It’s interesting, because it still is, on a lot of levels, very nuts and bolts. There’s not a ton of "let’s read this article and talk about it…" (although, we will do that from time to time) but then again, we’re only entering year two and much of what we have to do is get better at what we want to be very, very good at. We’ve got enough structure in place after last year that we’re not building the road three paces ahead of our walk, but we still have a lot of building to do. For me, the best part of forcing myself through this process, is it gives me a sense that our personal / professional learning / workshoping / time together is following along a path that is good for us as individuals and good for the school.

As always — comments, questions, thoughts, ideas about all of us is always encouraged.