The model you suggest would certainly be popular with teachers and quite effective but I am curious to know what kind of school you work in. I don’t know many schools that could afford the cost of human resources that your model implies.

Warm bodies are very nice but they are expensive. The PD models we propose need to be afordable and sustainable for all schools.

Regards

Bryn

It is almost subliminal PD. The teacher sees it largely as ’support’, but in effect it re-models how they go about setting a task, monitoring and supporting it and how to ‘cap’ the technology mastery skills based on the age of the students and ability.

After a few sessions, it starts to become clear that the teacher is able to focus on ‘the learning’ and less about ‘the content’. Eventually they take over the class again. Its not confronting and in no way smells like PD.

As I now have a dozen or so teachers open to the idea, then what I’m doing as EdTech is seen as a norm. So it gets easier each time.

One issue with PD as you’ve outlined is that it often is never supported of followed up in the classroom. Especially if its first day back or last day of term.

Learning should be on-demand, but works best if it is not too obvious at first what you are really up to.

DG

The leap to the networked world of your second alternative may be too big for many teachers without that transition. The world of Twitter et al is still a long way from where most teachers are.

That’s the transitional approach we’ve tried to take at ICTPD.NET and have found it to be quite effective but it is still a challenge to convince many teachers to engage with online environments.

@Tony Permission to use anything on this blog is given in advance. If I can pull it together, I’m going to have a go at producing a mash-up that distills the basic ideas from this post with examples from the web.

We are attempting a very basic 3 week PBL starting tomorrow for staff to engage with web2,0 and changes in learning following the style of your second list, may go belly up but its worth a shot.

I will be asking the “experienced quoir” or the already converted who blog or integrate great stuff in their classrooms to contribute after a week or so. Our staff can then read and see that the voices in the echo chamber are real and doing amazing things. The posts will then be reviewed in a future traditional top down staff meeting so staff can reflect on our shared learning.

Out ICT Committee is now the Just in Time Learning Team, ‘drop in drop out Wednesdays’ have also tentatively started and many staff are on board in that they are open to change, although we have not yet gone too far down the ICT integration route, as we just dont have the infrastructure in place. This is slowly changing and the executive are all on board so it looks promising.

We are building change around QTL not technology per se and staff are now seeing the need to change pedagogy first because the learnersa are different, not just using more technology poorly.