July 2013 Professional Practice magazine - expanding on a few things.

I woke up this morning and shuffled down to my computer to find an email from VIT waiting for me with the latest Professional Practice magazine.  It's got something in it that I thought would be a good thing to recap on.

From the 'Renewing your Registration" section:

When thinking about the relevance of your PD activities for renewal of registration, the question to ask is:

How does this activity support or enhance my professional knowledge and practice to improve the learning of my students?

This question allows activities to be relevant to the teaching context. However, if the connection between knowledge, practice and student learning cannot be made then the activity cannot be used for renewal of registration.

Apart from evidence to show you have undertaken the hours of PD activities for renewal of registration, you need to be able to show they reference the standards. To do this you can write a brief reflection about the activity explaining what you learnt and how you have or will apply it to your teaching practice to support the learning of your students.
Some questions to guide your reflection

• Which standard/s is most clearly related to this PD activity?
• What have you learnt from the PD activity that you could use to develop your teaching knowledge and/or practice?
• How will this PD activity contribute to your ability to meet the learning needs of your students?
• Which ideas from this PD activity will assist you in challenging and engaging your students more effectively in learning?
• What obstacles might you find to applying these ideas?
• What do these ideas contribute to the broader learning of students within your grade/subject area?
• How could these ideas be shared with colleagues or applied by you and your colleagues to contribute to teaching and learning in your school?
• What further learning does this activity prompt for you?

This is great info!  What's missing is exactly what a "PD activity" is.  Experience has taught us that there's quite a few teachers out there who are quite hazy on this one!  Last year we created a number of posts to help many understand that PD is about a lot more than sitting in front of a presenter using some standard, and some not so standard, examples.  Before you start I again suggest having a couple of those "Validating PD" pro-formas handy!

Posts to revisit:

PD and YOU - A look at why PD is considered necessary and a little on how VIT approaches it.

Teacher Identified PD - A look at why Teacher Identified PD is just as important as the PD selected by schools for their entire staff.

What is PD part 1.
What is PD part 2.
What is PD part 3.

The above 3 posts are about sources of PD besides workshops or online courses.  They provide some specific examples and a bit of a discussion based on the genre of the examples.

Collegial Learning Part 1
Collegial Learning Part 2
Collegial Learning part 3
Collegial Learning part 4

These 4 are about the ways in which collegial PD, learning from your colleagues, forms an inportant part of your professional development and why you should consider it an important aspect to include in your overall PD strategy.

Some of this we would do a little better on now, being a year down the road as Bloggers, but it's pretty much all there.  A few of the older links are also no longer working but it's going to take a few days to find links to alternate resources to fill the gaps!

Over the next little while we'll be doing a few posts about some other related topics and hopefully it won't take us any more than a few days.  We encourage you to join the blog as a follower if you have a Google account (gmail, youtube, google+, etc) or follow it by email otherwise.  There are tools in the side bar for both of these things and they will help keep you notified of when new posts appear on the blog.   

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Have any thoughts?  Please feel free to comment (if the comments box is not visible click on the "X comments" link under the post)!  No user account required!

Regards,

Mel.