After months of planning, my first week with teachers was finally here! The classroom was all set up with snacks, coffee, and flexible seating. Teachers that hadn't see the room commented about how they liked the setup! In the past, we met in a small conference room for our PD time, so this was a big change for everyone this year.
Once everyone was settled in with their cups of coffee, the work began. First, we talked about how important it is that we discover our passion and how we can try to integrate that into our EDventure. My principal had recommended that we should incorporate A.J. Juliani's article about finding your passion in this first meeting. I wanted to make this in a digital format, so I used this Google Doc and Form that I created based on the article. Teachers really liked the idea about validating their personal passions and interests, but some had difficulty writing ideas to fill the page. I think the idea behind finding your passion is great, but my execution was not the best way to go about it. Next time, I will probably just stick to pencil/paper for this one, unless I can think of a better way for teachers to get their thoughts down. But, overall it was a good way to get the conversation going and finding out the interests that everyone at our school has.
Next, I used PearDeck to create slides to introduce Personalized PD to teachers. Here is a Google Slides version of the presentation. This gave the vision that our principal and myself had for what it would look like in terms of what topics to choose and how to make this important decision. Teachers seemed to be interested in this new format for PD and were discussing what topics they might consider choosing. Teachers would have 1 week to think about what they would like to learn more about for their first EDventure.
Google Classroom has been a great way to stay organized and give information to teachers. I shared the slides about introducing CYOEd (Choose Your Own EDventure) and then also pushed out a copy of this CYOED Itinerary as a copy for each teacher. The hope was that within that week, teachers could select a topic that would be their focus for CYOEd and get to start the researching the following week. The itinerary was meant to get everyone thinking about what they would like to learn more about as well as considering how they might like to share what they learn at the end of the semester. One good question that was brought up was about time; some were concerned that they might need more than the semester to go in depth with their topic. We discussed that time should not be a limitation...if some topics were more involved, teachers could spend more than a semester working on it. It really depended on the topic and what the goals were as far as how much time would be needed. Another great feature of Google Classroom was that as the week went on, I could check in on the CYOEd Itineraries and see what topics were being chosen. Since the docs are shared in Classroom, our principal and myself had access to open them up.
I was interested to see what our staff would choose as their focus. The next week, I was planning on going further into the planning process and introducing the concept of building a PLN.
