What Makes PD Great for You?

Continuing on with Mr. Couros summer blog challenge, today I respond to a blog post on teacher's and professional development.

I came across this post in my twitter feed this morning. The post is called "What Matters in Teacher Professional Development" .

I agree with this post. When we have professional development days at my school and our administration set up PD opportunities there was usually an overall "sigh". I don't think it was because what was chosen for us wasn't useful or relevant to the vision of our school....it was just that the teacher's didn't get to choose.

On that note, for myself, whether I chose the PD or the PD I chose really wasn't as engaging or relevant as I was hoping. I have decided that, as a teacher I have chosen to be a life long learner, no matter how entertaining or exciting the PD session is, there is always something I can learn from it. I want to learn more and therefore there is always something I can get out of a session.

Something I look for when I go to professional development which I rarely find but am extremely excited when I do is when there is a great strategy or idea and they can show me how I can tie it to the curriculum. I know there is more to teaching then just the curriculum but sometimes struggle with the connection (especially in Language Arts) between the strategy, idea, or concept and how it is connected to what I have to teach.

With that being said, one of the best PD sessions I went to was on the 6+1 Traits of Writing and the curriculum. The whole session was different strategies on how to teach the 6+1 Traits and then at the end we were given rubrics that specifically tied the traits to each grades Language Arts outcomes! I saw relevance and used the strategies and rubrics in my classroom immediately!

I leave you today with these questions (please don't hesitate to respond via the comments) What was the best PD session you attended? What made it so good?
If you were to lead a PD session what would your topic be and what would you do to make sure your attendees were satisfied?