Home Grown PD: Don't Wait for your District
In schools today budgets are tight. Professional development dollars are shrinking. In my case, our district just instituted four furlough days; all of them faculty professional development days. Luckily we like to plan ahead. In the beginning of the school year we voted to divide one of our "Flex" PD days into several smaller sessions. This means we took one of the 3 professional development days front-loaded in the beginning of the school year and agreed to make up the hours over the course of the school year. This works for our faculty. After all, in the beginning of the school year teachers are focused on setting up curriculum and classrooms. Dispersing one of these days allows us to target topics or issues that might arise after the school year begins. When we began talking about what type of PD we needed it was different across the board- different grade levels and departments had different needs. Our solution was to develop our own PD Learning Series where teache