Our Story Behind the Story

Our WHY

Our WHY (Sinek, 2009) has always been the growth and success of our students. Our ultimate goal is to create self-directed lifelong learners that will be productive members of society. In order to accomplish our goal, we must continue to grow our teachers and instill a positive mindset of lifelong learning. They, in turn, will instill that same love for learning in our students. Although teachers attend countless hours of Professional Learning every year to continue to learn, grow, and foster a learning mindset, most sessions are considered ineffective. In fact, Gulamhussein (2013), states that in a recent study, researchers found that while 90% of teachers reported participating in professional development, most of those teachers also reported that it was totally useless. Most current professional learning sessions are delivered in a one size fits all “Sit & Get” approach where new teachers are often left confused and overwhelmed, while veteran teachers are often left frustrated with the redundant information. Just like students deserve personalized and differentiated instruction, so do our teachers. We believe we can reach and grow more teachers, and in turn reach more students, with a “Go and Show” professional blended learning approach that provides teachers with Choice, Ownership, and Voice through authentic professional learning opportunities.  

Our WHAT  

Professional Learning: The Go & Show Blended Way, is our Call to Action presentation where we promote the dire need for change in professional learning. Our objective is to use Google Slides as visual aids while we personally present and promote our alternative professional learning ideas and express our rationale for change, to our administration. 

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Our HOW 

In order to create an effective Alternative Professional Learning plan for our campus, Veronica Balli, Ileana Reyna and I, first discussed our WHY. We then came up with an outline of what we wanted our presentation to look like and sound like. Although all three of us are veteran teachers and have experienced many professional learning sessions ourselves, we decided that we needed to hear directly from teachers on our campus, especially those that had less than 5 years teaching, so that we may understand their learning needs.  

Once we met with our colleges, we knew we wanted to discuss current PL feelings and trends, the 5 Principles of Effective PD, the use of COVA in a blended PL environment, and the rationale behind the change. We then began creating a slide deck, while keeping in mind tips we learned from How Presentation Zen Fixed My Bad Powerpoints by Jennifer Gonzalez, and How to Avoid Death by Powerpoint by David JP Phillips. We also understood that feedforward from our classmates and professors would drive the evolution of our presentation, so we decided not to create a video at this time in order to efficiently add, adjust, or change our presentation as needed. 

Using Duarte’s presentation structure we began telling our story and capturing the hearts and minds of our administration, with our WHY. We paid close attention to what is at stake if the current PL model is not changed and promoted the positive change throughout.