Professional Learning

Whilst the world continues to evolve, education has been grappling to cope and stay afloat. There are several significant challenges the educational system is currently facing. This includes overall low student performance, poor teacher retention, and inadequate innovation programs to support the growing demands of a technology- dependent society. Learning does not only involve our students, education has been defined as a cycle of transferring knowledge and experience from specialists to teachers then to students. Teachers are primarily equipped with the basic foundation of teaching. Throughout their tenure, they gain additional information, strategies and practices from continuing education, workshops, seminars, and other forms of professional development. These are great opportunities to learn but unfortunately not all appear to be effective. Some are presented with outdated information, others lack the relevance to the attending audience, while some are simply not tailored to address the needs of our students. This definitely defeats the purpose of what a true professional development should be. As it is still true that professional growth is necessary to all of us, we need to uplift and make necessary changes to the current content and delivery of these learning opportunities.

Allison Gulamhussein (2013) outlines 5 principles that will guide school leaders in designing effective professional learning opportunities to teachers. These are simple and practical approaches that can make a difference in providing meaningful learning opportunities to teachers.

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BACKSTORY ( "Why" )

For as long as I can remember, attendance should not be the operative word to use when one is invited to be part of a Professional Development, instead it should be participation. Being present counts for attendance but being engaged and actively involved depicts participation. One needs to be present and actively engaged in the learning environment to show that the intention of holding the professional development is successfully met. I am guilty to admit that I now fall under the former, attending and not participating. And this is my “WHY” behind proposing an alternative Professional Learning. I personally need to shift my outlook towards attending and being part of any professional learning opportunities. As the transition happens within me, I will be able to influence and share with my colleagues, even with the rest of my school community a more meaningful learning environment. When we educators, including our school leaders, are creating and participating in effective teaching and learning professional developments, we can learn new strategies, acquire new skills and discover new information we can utilize in the classroom. As a result of this additional knowledge, student’s needs are addressed, allowing them to meet age and grade-level expectations, and yielding improved student performance.

As part of implementing my Blended Learning Innovation Plan, I need to have my team on board by sharing all pertinent information with them through ongoing professional development. The professional learning environment will include hands-on workshops and demonstration of blended learning instruction and activities. These collaborative learning sessions will enable me to impart with them the “WHY” or the rationale of integrating blended learning in the classroom. As teachers need to be trained the way they intend to educate their students, the professional learning sessions will focus on them experiencing the learning atmosphere and being immersed like actual students. They need to fully understand and experience our “WHY” for them to adopt and implement blended learning in their classrooms. Furthermore, on-going support, coaching and assistance will be provided to ensure constant communication and collaboration are available to them.

Lights, Camera, Action
( "What" )

BACKSTAGE ( "How" )

As I was preparing to create my Call to Action presentation, I considered several factors to make sure I addressed all required sections and met expectations. After going through all the readings and videos, I was able to take into account some key information to guide me in composing the “WHY, and most especially in producing a call to action

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video. The motivation and goal at the same time was to convey a significant message that will impact all of us, now and in the coming years.

Composing the “WHY” gave me another opportunity to reflect on my experience in attending, participating, and now facilitating professional learning sessions. I had a lot of realizations that when I was planning the video, I started to outline my thoughts, making a comparison of what I have read or viewed

and what I have experienced. This way, I was able to organize my thoughts and highlight what I intend to share to the audience. I then put my “filmmaker” hat on, ready to produce, write the script, direct and even act in my story. I conceptualized my story using all the information I gathered from the resources provided and my first-hand experience. I started writing a script for the voice-over that first came out quite lengthy, but after several editing and revisions, I was able to a more concise version. I chose a topic sentence for each paragraph, while taking notes on possible visuals I can incorporate in the video presentation. Now that I have the script to the story, time to put it to life. I then considered several software applications to use as the perfect tool that can communicate the message effectively.

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I chose Movavi Video Editor primarily because its functions are easy to manage. It offers default and sample background music, animation sounds, intro videos, filters, transitions, and other basic features for audio-visual projects. It also allows you to upload your own music, record sounds or voice-over, and adjust pacing and overall flow of the visuals. My media device is all set, I then gathered materials, mostly online pictures, graphics, animated prints, and videos based on every topic sentence and worked on my initial layout. I arranged and organized the visuals based on the storyboard.

To complete it, I recorded my voice-over while playing the visuals. Several attempts after, the audio was still not complementing the visual stream. I edited the script again, removed some visuals, re recorded until the audio (voiceover) matches the visuals. I also decided to add some text slides to highlight key points, including credits pages to cite references and visual/graphics sources. I also added some instrumental background music to enhance the overall effect of the presentation, adjusted the resolution of some of the visuals, fine-tuned the quality of the voice-over, and played with some simple transitions to finalize the presentation. It was quite challenging at first to put together a multimedia project, but

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having a detailed plan was the most important element of the whole project. I still find my paper-pencil note-taking, cross out erase rewrite again technique reliable. Old meets new, traditional meets technology. But what worked out with the creation stage was saving the file every edit or addition to the project. As the creator and director, I have full control of everything, so I was very flexible. I explored different designs, formats, layouts, music, and combinations until I was happy with the outcome. For the voice-over, I

practices with the volume of the recording, as well as the speed while I was reading the spiels. I made sure that the background music does not interfere with the voice-over. The visuals are simple but are meaningful and catchy. Some slides have short texts to encapsulate the message, most just speaks for itself. Another important consideration was not to make the whole presentation too short that it lacks the information to relay or too long that it can lose the attention of the audience. After finalizing it, I saved it as MP4 to be uploaded on my ePortfolio.

In addition to call to action video, I also prepared an infographic to summarize the 5 Principles of an Effective Professional Development (Gulamhussein, 2013). I used Piktochart, an online tool for creating infographics, presentation slides, reports, flyers, and posters. I have utilized this application before where I am able to choose a template and customize the content, graphics, and overall layout. After summarizing the 5 principles, I worked on designing a simple layout to highlight each principle. I added some graphics, cited my reference and saved the file as PDF to before uploading it to my ePortfolio.

Overall, I realized I actually enjoyed creating my call to action video, including the infographic. I am very excited to share it with my colleagues and hopefully, it can really have an impact on them as how I intended it to be.

References:

Andrews, T. M., Leonard, M. J., Colgrove, C. A., & Kalinowski, S. T. (2011). Active learning not associated with student learning in a random sample of college biology courses. CBE life sciences education, 10(4), 394–405. http://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.11-07-0061

Duarte, N. [Stanford Graduate School of Business]. (2013a, March 21). Nancy Duarte: How to tell a story [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JrRQ1oQWQk

Duarte, N. [Stanford Graduate School of Business]. (2013b, February 19). Nancy Duarte: How to create better visual presentations [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so9EJoQJc-0

Goodwin, B. (2015). Research says/does teacher collaboration promote teacher growth? educational leadership, 73(4), 82–83. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/dec15/vol73/num04/Does-Teacher-Collaboration- Promote-Teacher-Growth%C2%A2.aspx

Gulamhussein, A. (2013). Teaching the teachers effective professional development in an era of high stakes accountability. Center for public education. Retrieved from http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/system/files/2013176_ProfessionalDevelopment.pdf

Professional Learning Outline

Professional Learning Plan