Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Bowman County School District follows the Continuous Improvement Plan when
developing and deciding on professional development. The school’s goals are created with the
mission and vision statements in mind. Through the accreditation process, information is
gathered and evaluated and “a thorough report gives you both a broad understanding and detailed
insights into where your school or system excels and where you need to invest resources”
(Cognia, 2020). The information from this process is used by the Leadership Committee and
administration to create the professional development plan. This ensures “PD is valued” (Briggs,
2018, para 4). Much of the professional development includes the entire staff, although
individual staff do attend workshops, approved by both leadership committee and administration,
and they are required to bring back helpful information to our school and present.
Office 365 is a service the state of North Dakota subscribes to, including all education
entities. It provides a suite of services including office applications, web-based and mobile apps,
Skype, SharePoint and cloud storage. The Microsoft Teams app is the hub
for team collaboration. The Teams app integrates teachers, information, and tools the school
staff can use to be more engaged and organized. It is “a seamless platform that not only
streamlines your teaching workflow, but also makes it possible for you to create a space for more
robust collaboration between your students” (Gonzalez, 2018, para 3) and staff. In Teams, there
is an additional app, OneNote, where a content library can be created and shared. Information,
including videos and websites can be embedded to share as resources. There is also video
Implementation
Teams has a conversation tab where staff can communicate and ask questions. You can
also message individual staff. I would have sections for each of the school’s goals and after in-
service or training, I would have teachers upload lesson plans and/or activities they have done in
their own classrooms to share with the entire staff. This will not only pass ideas throughout the
grade levels, but it will make teachers be held accountable to try newly learned strategies.
Office 365 also has an app called Forms. This is a simple way to create surveys and send
them to staff. Surveys give valuable information and allows everyone has a voice. This is also
an app that students can utilize as well. Asking for feedback from the students is a way to gauge
the effectiveness of tools and techniques learned during professional development and offer
New knowledge needs to be put into practice. Our professional development is a process
as we are working on school wide goals. The leadership committee designs monthly trainings to
enhance teachers’ knowledge and skills to help the school reach the CIP goals. Each month,
upon completion of training, teachers focus on skills learned, working together in smaller groups
in weekly PLC meetings. Monthly documentation (data) and/or lesson plans will be added to the
applicable goal, trying new strategies/information in individual classrooms. PLCs would focus
one week a month to evaluate training and implementation and share the information with
building principal. The principal will take the information to the school leadership committee
Rationale
Teacher in-service is an important step for growing and nurturing staff. It is important to
shower teachers with information as a downpour gives a feeling of drowning. Teachers can
become overwhelmed. It is also to be mindful of the ‘One and Done’ trainings, as these are time
spent in training, but they are not effectively implemented into the classrooms. Darling-
Hammond, Hyler, and Gardner (2017) state “Effective professional development provides
teachers with adequate time to learn, practice, implement, and reflect upon new strategies that
facilitate changes in their practice. As a result, strong PD initiatives typically engage teachers in
learning over weeks, months, or even academic years, rather than in short, one-off workshops”
(para 20). Professional development needs to align with school wide goals and needs to be
continuous. It is important to focus on having staff accountability when staff leave the training
session. “No Matter how good the training is, adding connection capabilities like chatting and
file sharing always strengthens it” (Briggs, 2018, para 7). Once training is complete, teachers
will be able to connect through Microsoft Teams to discuss, share and evaluate new strategies
and/or information. Asking teachers to evaluate and reflect on professional development, may
look like more work for teachers, but providing PCL times to work in Teams will be helpful.
Teachers will also use this time to look over others’ teaching practices and can pick up insightful
https://www.cognia.org/services/accreditation-certification/
https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/effective-teacher-professional-development-
brief
Gonzalez, J (2018, Aug 8) Build a Collaborative Classroom with Microsoft Teams. Cult of