Setting up a Continous Professional Development team

Photo Credit : Torbus

How many times does it happen that you come across an incident that forces you to reflect and make you dig deeper to get a better understanding of underlying theories so that you can improve on your teaching practice. These incidents are happening all the time but not everybody is equipped to spot these opportunities and not everybody can reflect on it.

Reflection in a professional setting is:

• deliberate;
• purposeful;
• structured;
• about linking theory and practice;
• to do with learning;
• about change and development.

So this is not about deep contemplation about abstract theories of life and pondering on the mysteries of life. This is structured inquiry that leads to development in an immediate future. Flinnt has the potential to be used as a Continuous Professional Development tool within any educational institution.

Step 1 : Setup the group
Decide on the members of the group and the roles that they will play.

• In case there are many inexperienced educators then it makes sense to nominate a few of the senior educators as the group coordinators with the responsibility of spotting, sharing and sequencing the flinnts.
• In case it is a small group of equally experienced educators then it makes sense to put all the peers at the same level and let all of them post the flinnts.
• All it requires is that too many incidents being posted without due deliberation and inquiry is not desirable, hence having clear role definitions and rules is imperative for a successful professional development group.

Step 2 : Identify learning opportunities from real practice
It is important that this group does not become a place for big educational theories to be floated around, the group will begin to believe that this group is like the teacher education courses with a lot of focus on theory and scant regard to practice.
Hence real incidents like:

• Some examples of classroom behaviour;
• Parental feedback and expectations;
• Planned lesson activities;
• Assessment samples.

Should be identified and relevant materials related to the incident should be collected. Important and significant incidents should be chosen that are relevant to all the group members. The vision, mission and values of the educational institution can be used to choose the right incidents, the incidents which can further the vision, mission and values should be prioritized.

Step 3 : Structure, sequence and collaborate

The versatility of the Flinnt platform in terms of its ability to tag each of the post, the chronological sequence and the ability to share various kinds of media like links to various websites, links to youtube videos, sharing of documents, audio recordings and images make it the ideal choice to sequence a series of flinnts. Based on each of the issue a deliberate, purposeful and structured sequence of flinnts should be posted bringing out the issue and further linking theory and practice.

Try to limit yourself to 1-2 flinnts everyday as it might not be possible for all the educators to read, comprehend and contribute to the discussion if it is going along at a break neck speed. Always remember that in case of professional development, quality always takes precedent over quantity. One topic that has been fully exploited for its learning potential is better than 10 topics that are discussed in a superfluous manner.

Step 4 : Summarize and conclude
It is important that once all the flinnts related to the incident have been posted and a discussion has been initiated, one or two flinnts with a summary of what has been discussed and what has been the learning should be posted. It is important that the message be reinforced, all the group members might not be at the same level of professional development and some of them might take a little longer to comprehend what is being said. You need to scaffold the team members in exactly the same manner that you expect them to work with their learners.

MOST IMPORTANT:
Get started! It all sounds very good but all you need to do is take the first step and get started, I am sure once you start, rest of the things will fall in place.
Happy Flinnting.