Guess what, dear readers? Today’s after-school professional development meeting was wonderfully productive!
Today, we shared lesson ideas with each other in small interdisciplinary groups. We were given a specific protocol for sharing our lessons and giving/receiving feedback. I got some very helpful feedback from my colleagues on my lesson.
I think I know what made this meeting so different from last week’s meeting: it was planned and facilitated by teachers. I’ve heard similar stories from my friends: one friend told me about how her school’s experiment at letting math teachers plan their own PD meetings was so successful that even teachers from other disciplines were coming to their meeting.
It seems reasonable that this would be the case. Administrators are under pressure from higher-ups in the district to design professional development around the flavor-of-the-month trend in education; teachers are under much more practical pressures–they want to teach well and not spend every waking moment working. Also, letting teachers have a greater sense of autonomy seems like a good idea.
Adventures in Teaching 
Teacher-leaders, woo hoo. I’ve heard that phrase somewhere before…
So glad to hear that you were able to use this time productively. I hope your administrators witnessed the difference in how teachers responded to this session.
That sounds a lot like our city’s community policing efforts. Sometimes I attend community meetings with “training” components conducted by Community Service Officers who seem to prep by reading internet pages about things like identity theft. Waste of time. And “they” wonder why more people don’t attend the meetings. I wish I could run my own city meeting 😉