CRT Network Professional Development opportunities and how they fit in with your VIT registration.
Recently we’ve been passing emails and chatting to Dawn Colcott from the Victorian Institute of Teaching about Professional Development and VIT registration. We wanted to know exactly how the Professional Development opportunities that CRT Networks offer can benefit CRTs and how we fit into the Professional Development process. There’s a lot of documentation out there that is straight down the line and kind of clinical but we wanted to be able to put it into plain English. By passing this on you can understand exactly what we are offering as networks and why it's of benefit to you to join one, whether it's ours or someone else's.
Professional Development and Personal Reflection.
The first thing we’d like to impress upon you is that simply attending any of the PD opportunities we offer does NOT automatically qualify as Professional Development. VIT requires that you also reflect on what you have learnt and submit that reflection as part of reporting your Professional Development activities. The reflection is required to be able to include the time spent at the Seminar/Workshop. They have some suggestions on the type of questions you should ask yourself when doing this:
· Some questions to guide your reflection
· Which standards are most clearly related to this PD activity?
· Which ideas from the PD activity could you use to develop your 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?
· What obstacles might you find to applying these ideas?
· What do these ideas contribute to the broader learning of students within your subject/grade 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?
Dawn would like us to add that the time spent reflecting on the activity and writing the reflection can be counted towards PD hours.
She has also supplied some documents on standards, reflection and how it all fits together that we will be placing in a public folder in our Skydrive. We encourage you to look at them because we aren't offering a full overview of Professional Development, just how the opportunities we offer fit into the process!
She has also supplied some documents on standards, reflection and how it all fits together that we will be placing in a public folder in our Skydrive. We encourage you to look at them because we aren't offering a full overview of Professional Development, just how the opportunities we offer fit into the process!
VIT Random Audits.
VIT audits a random selection of teachers Professional Development submissions every year. Audited teachers are required to supply evidence of, and justification for, their Professional Development submissions. Although many things are “technically allowed” they can be hard to prove or justify. This sort of submission is judged on a case-by-case basis.
When you attend one of our Professional Development Seminars you receive a certificate of participation recognised by VIT. This means it’s very easy to show that the hours you have claimed are the hours you have done making the audit process a much more streamlined and less worrisome process for you. When you attend a monthly meeting we keep participation records towards the same end. Please bear in mind that your reflection is as crucial as any supporting evidence we can provide!
Professional Development Seminars/Workshops.
Many CRT Networks access DEECD funding in order to offer Professional Development Seminars or Workshops and ours is one of them. We organize either full day or half day formats so we can supply a range of options to local CRTs. Our Network tries to run 4 full-day Seminars or Workshops per year and as many half day seminars as we are able to fund after that. We can’t guarantee this but it’s always the goal for us.
We provide participation certificates for each Seminar/Workshop that we run and these are recognised by VIT. They contain the name of the Presenter, your name, the date, the duration of the seminar/workshop and are signed by both the Presenter and our Network Coordinator.
The duration is based on actual face-time with the presenter and not start/finish times of the seminar/workshop. This means that meal-breaks are not included in this time.
· Full Day Seminars/Workshops are generally 6.5 hours but may be more or less depending on the presenter.
· Half-day Seminars/Workshops are either 2 and a half or three hours.
It is our understanding that, by discussing what you have just learnt in the last segment with colleagues, breaks during Professional development workshops are able to be qualified as Professional Development. For Workshops not supplying a Pdi PASS code we give the face-time with the presenter on the certificates we provide. We do not recommend or endorse you in doing this and offer no evidence that you have. We realise that in all likelyhood this is exactly what you will do however you will need to provide your own justification should you claim this time.
Please remember that if you are using a Pdi PASS code then break time is already included in the hours for the PD. You should not claim break time again on top of these hours.
Please note that while we try to run a variety of Professional Development Seminars/Workshops in a volume that caters for all our region’s CRTs, we do not guarantee that you will receive a space in any Professional Development Seminar/Workshop and do not guarantee you a minimum number of places a year. We only reserve places once you have booked and paid the fee ($10 for CRTs) for the Professional Development Seminar/Workshop in question. We do this on a first-come-first-served basis. Members will receive emails announcing Professional Development Opportunities and, at the same time, the announcement will also be placed on both of our blog pages. It is up to you to keep an eye on them and get your seat early!
Monthly Meetings.
Our monthly meetings also qualify as Professional Development but unlike our Seminars/Workshops are member-only. We don’t currently give certificates for monthly meetings because we operate on a no-membership fee basis. The only cost is a gold-coin donation to cover drinks and snacks. We want to keep our membership free and the gold coin donation which we won’t be able to do if we start printing certificates for every meeting! Instead we keep participation records via sign-in sheets for our meetings. If audited, you can request these sheets to supply the needed justification for your Professional Development submissions. They will have start and end times so your time at the meeting will be clear-cut.We hold 11 meetings a year but we have no minimum attendance per year for members. You are free to attend as many or as few as you like.
Other Professional Development resources.
We do our best to keep links to interesting sources of self-researched Professional Development resources on our blog. These are only intended to be launching points for your own exploration. We offer no form of endorsement for any of the research you do through our blog in this way. We are just trying to be helpful!
In 2010 we also upgraded the blog so many of the posts themselves would be valid sources of PD. They are structured so that, for all practical intents and purposes, they can be treated in exactly the same way os a collegial meeting for the purposed of PD. In fact many of the posts are the result of topics that came up in our Monthly Meetings including important discussion points and conclusions. It's our way of offering the benefits of these collegial meetings to those who are unable to attend.
Likewise, our Skydrive will eventually be populated with a large number of documents to help you down the same road of self-education. Again we are just trying to be helpful and cannot endorse any Professional Development you gain while doing so.
In 2010 we also upgraded the blog so many of the posts themselves would be valid sources of PD. They are structured so that, for all practical intents and purposes, they can be treated in exactly the same way os a collegial meeting for the purposed of PD. In fact many of the posts are the result of topics that came up in our Monthly Meetings including important discussion points and conclusions. It's our way of offering the benefits of these collegial meetings to those who are unable to attend.
Likewise, our Skydrive will eventually be populated with a large number of documents to help you down the same road of self-education. Again we are just trying to be helpful and cannot endorse any Professional Development you gain while doing so.
The last word.
Between full-day Seminars/Workshops and monthly meetings our network reliably offers 53 and a half hours of Professional Development per year, backed with certificates and attendance records. That is more than two and a half times the required 20 hours per year should you attend everything.
While coming changes are doing away with the 50/50 system of previous years, we DO recommend that you try to attend one Seminar/Workshop and a couple of meetings a year. Best of luck everyone!
While coming changes are doing away with the 50/50 system of previous years, we DO recommend that you try to attend one Seminar/Workshop and a couple of meetings a year. Best of luck everyone!
Melinda Lichnovsky-Klock
Wodonga CRT Support Network Coordinator.
