Duration: 2:27
Pakuranga College principal, Michael Williams explains their system for PLD. Using their rubrics teachers can identify their strengths and next steps. e-Mentors support teachers with their inquiries into using digital technologies effectively. Michael explains, "staff will self identify where they think they are. We support them, we plan those next steps."
How do I prepare teachers to be effective and use all of the technologies that are available to them? The rubrics are really important for us as a school to plot where we’re going. So we developed rubrics in a number of areas around the school how the, what the students should be doing in a classroom, activities teachers should be doing, structural things within the school and we plot where we are on those rubrics.
Staff will self-identify where they think they are. We support them, we plan those next steps. Through some of the PD, we get staff to set their challenges of where they want to go. That helps us to identify what support they’ll need. Our ideal is, teachers are thinking about the students in front of them, how they want to help them learn and them always looking what tools and resources are available that I can use to help these students learn. It’s one of the mistakes we often make in professional learning in schools is we teach teachers how to do a whole pile of things. We’re much better off to help teachers uncover the desire and the need to do it and then they’re really good at learning it. So when that moment comes and the teacher says, “I want to learn how to do this”, that’s when you roll some support in and that’s where the being strategic around the roles that you’ve got in the school is really important.
For us, our e-learning mentors in every faculty are there as the go to person. Also, you need to be showcasing the possibilities so we do some work around showcasing. It’s also really helpful for us to have some basic expectations. Some of our rubrics are really clear with staff about, for them to identify where they think they are, what their next steps would be but we’ve also used some tools to make life easy for us. So for this year, for example, we’ve gone to Google classroom for the year nines so we want all our staff to be using Google classroom, so we’ve done some basic work around that and it’s given them a base level. So, even those teachers who are not using the technology or are not comfortable with the technology, here’s been a really easy thing for them to be their first step into it. A key part of our strategy is around how we teach, which is around teachers out moving into that space about teaching as inquiry. For us it’s around how do we build those reflective practitioners? Those adaptive expertees.