Archives: professionaldev

In David A. Sousa’s article Brain-Friendly Learning for Teachers in the free online June 2009 edition of Educational Leadership, he reviews what we know about how we learn and asserts that we may just want to consider this important information when we craft professional development courses for teachers. Imagine that. Simple exposure, a.k.a. “seat-time,” is not enough to enhance teacher effectiveness. They actually have to LEARN something!

Of course this is not news to us, but you wouldn’t know it, really, from looking at how professional development is created. Too often we plan or procure professional opportunities for teachers without consideration for adult learning theories, let alone brain research. The article makes a few important recommendations and explains why, neurologically, each should be considered if a professional development activity is to make a positive impact. You must read the article to understand why, but here are a few brain-friendly findings:

• Motivation is key, and teachers, like other adults, are usually motivated to learn things to build their skills. Activities that connect directly to job-related goals are more meaningful.
• Effective feedback — timely, specific and positive feedback — contributes to motivation.
• A positive learning situation, one in which the teacher is engaged and has ownership, is more likely to stimulate the part of the brain that allows for attention and retention of the skills or knowledge presented.
• Topics must be presented over enough time and in enough depth to allow for thorough understanding. Social and collaborative opportunities around the topic can help with implementation.

From what we’ve observed, it seems that the impact of professional development, the learning and application of learning, is often not even evaluated. If an evaluation is done, it is usually a post-workshop survey that focuses on the event rather than its impact, and the result may be that the workshop serving the best box lunch is most highly rated! While effective evaluation is more resource intensive, it needs to happen. Otherwise, how will we know we are making the best use of our professional development dollars?

As we have begun planning for our annual LEARN NC conference, I want to tell you about some of the strategies I learned in the HR class I took last week, “Managing Projects Successfully.”  These strategies may seem obvious, but they are all important and sometimes overlooked.

1.       Define the project and its requirements. When given a project, ask questions, make sure the purpose and goals of the project are clear.  With the supervisor or sponsor, discuss who the project team members should be. Determine the resources that will be necessary to have a successful project.  Make sure that your sponsor is totally committed to the project. That person needs to give you the authority to make changes in the project if necessary. The supervisor supports and empowers the project manager to get the job done.

2.       Define the stakeholders. As the project manager, you are a major stakeholder, but there are many stakeholders including the sponsor, the people who are involved in the project and those that will be affected by the project.  This even includes vendors that provide supplies for the project.

3.       Create a statement of work and define the goals and objectives (deliverables).  Objectives need to be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.  

4.       Create a work break-down structure including timeline.

5.       Create a risk analysis (the pitfalls) and have a contingency plan.

6.       Develop a project budget which includes performance and administrative costs.

7.       Hold scheduled team meetings and have a communication structure in place to make sure that all members are on the same page and aware of where the project is on the timeline. All team members must have buy-in to the project. Communication is critical.

8.       Evaluation of the project doesn’t just come at the end. You must evaluate all aspects of the project throughout the life of the project so that changes can be made if necessary along the way.

9.       At the end of the project, summarize the major accomplishments or deliverables, review the budget variances, assess the team’s performance, prepare and present a final report, and make recommendations for future projects.

10.   Most importantly Document everything!

We had a productive meeting with Angela Bardeen and Chad Haefele from the UNC libraries. So many of the periodicals we would like to read are already part of the Libraries’ subscription services. Besides, with our work loads it is increasingly unlikely that we’ll keep up with reading our journals, so it seems even more foolish to subscribe to print editions.

Setting up an RSS feed from brings the most current articles to your desktop and offers an opportunity to stay current with a small investment of time and no investment of money. We spent about an hour working to get feeds in three RSS environments: Pageflakes, iGoogle and Google Reader.

Pageflakes and iGoogle provide a dashboard-type widget-intensive option that many of us find useful. If you need help with Pageflakes, Bobby and I are using that pretty extensively. Gail was working in iGoogle. Google Reader is easier to set up, I think, but requires you to actually go to another place to read your feeds… unless you cheat and use a web page widget in your Pageflakes to display your Google Reader feeds, like I do!

Bottom line, it was pretty easy to get the subscription content from some of the vendors, namely EBSCOhost, CSA, Gale and ISI, working in our various readers of choice. RSS feeds are still “experimental” in these products, so there is no guarantee that it will always work (as we experienced ourselves Tuesday morning!). Our library guides reassured us that if we persevere, we will get the feeds working just as we need them to, and if we get stuck, they are just an email or phone call away.

Contact Angela or Chad if you have any questions or need further assistance:
bardeen at email.unc.edu
chaefele at email.unc.edu
or by phone 919-962-1151