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Let’s be honest for a second… Have you ever found yourself trapped in a seemingly irrelevant professional development session, sitting painfully, watching the clock slowly tick by while someone drones on at the front?  You know the presenter is apparently supposed to be teaching you something that will help develop you as the professional educator that you are, yet for the life of you all you can hear is…

First thing I need to note.  I am sharing this work that has been done on this plan because the idea was first shared with me.  Kudos and thanks to George Couros for so freely and consistently sharing his work, resources, and experiences.  It is this same spirit of transparently sharing that is the foundation of this plan. 

We began developing this plan by forming a PD committee with representation from all staff groupings: early years teachers, middle years teachers, and Educational Assistants.  We set aside a day to work together to vision cast and plan what professional development could look like in our school.  The result of this day is our Muir Lake School Collaborate, Create, Learn (CCL) School Professional Development Plan.  The cornerstone principles of the PD plan are:

Self-directed

Maximizing Staff Expertise

Collaboration

Transparent Sharing

Distributed Leadership

Time and resources

Self-directed– By enabling self-directed learning opportunities for our staff we are ensuring that the learning is relevant, meaningful and powerful.  We want time to be spent on creating work that will have an impact on our students and teachers in the classroom.  Each team will set their own learning objectives and measurements of success.  Staff chooses what they work on, within the framework of the plan. 

Maximizing Staff Expertise – This plan is really about taking the best of each person; passion and expertise, and putting it on display.  Staff chooses their priority area that they will focus upon based upon professional/personal strengths and interests. 

Collaboration– We are better together.  Work is not done in isolation.  Each person participates on a CCL team and works together to advance their specific priority areas within the school and beyond. 

Transparent Sharing – All work done by each CCL team will be shared transparently in a variety of ways: Twitter (#muirlake), the Muir Lake School Blog, email, formal and informal conversations, team teaching, learning rounds, and PD sessions.  Utilizing online platforms will allow other staff to see and learn from other CCL teams that they are not a part of at their own convenience and interest. 

Distributed Leadership – Every staff member has a part to play in advancing and leading the priority areas as a member of a CCL team.  Creating and enabling multiple sources of instructional leadership better serves to advance school improvement in the priority areas. 

Time and Resources – For successful PD plans to happen within a school and to create everlasting success, time and resources must be invested.  The plan will continue to be developed over a 2-3 year period.  Ultimately, the plan will have had true success when the priority areas are integrated in practice. 

If you haven’t already clicked the link Muir Lake School Collaborate, Create, Learn (CCL) School Professional Development Plan above, I invite you to that now.  I invite you to give your feedback to the plan by commenting on the Google Doc, or leaving a comment here in response to this post… and yes of course.  If anything here can benefit your school feel free to take any of the work we have done, change it, modify it, build upon it, improve it and make it yours!