MACE

Discover and create practical ways to implement flexible and personalized PL environments that support ongoing teacher professional growth. Create PL structures that change HOW PL happens, empowering teachers to be learning leaders. Flexible PL encourages cross-curricular, cross grade-level sharing between novice and expert teachers for ongoing growth/leadership. The purpose of the session is to consider how traditional professional learning sessions with a trainer speaking from the front of the room while scrolling through slides do not meet the needs of the professionals who come with different skill sets, philosophies of education, and understandings of evidence-based best practices in instruction and technology integration. Designing sets of self-paced learning tasks that can be personalized by each attendee to meet his or her own needs is challenging. Knowledge gained in traditional PD settings often has a “knowing-doing gap” resulting in a lack of application in the classroom. As coaches, we knew Professional Development needed to shift to meaningful Professional Learning at our sites in order to become more personalized, flexible, and lead to application within classrooms. Learners at our session will explore how we’ve met that challenge, consider research on adult learning theory and alignment to the ISTE standards, before creating their own flexible professional learning opportunity that will more effectively meet the needs of adult learners at their own future trainings.