Dealing with a ‘Culture of Fear’—Administrators on PD in the Age of Blended Learning

By Mary Jo Madda (Columnist)     Mar 15, 2017

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-03-15-dealing-with-a-culture-of-fear-administrators-on-pd-in-the-age-of-blended-learning

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Who should deliver PD, the administrators or the teachers?

very important is for blended learning to not be a separate, compartmentalized aspect of learning at a school site.

With traditional PD, we’re bringing people in constantly and we’re taking them out of their classrooms. But I think one of the effective strategies for teachers is to actually bring them into classrooms, to see [blended learning] in action. It’s one thing to sit at a table and be given pedagogical practices and do the variety of things we normally do at a traditional PD.

In blended learning, we can move a lot of that more pedantic stuff to an online environment, and then the actual PD becomes collaborative.

one of the things that we might want to consider is the “fear factor” involved…. It’s overcoming fear and not overwhelming teachers, and that’s why delivering PD in a blended environment gives them that time to absorb, I think. I think that’s absolutely critical.

we recorded everything, had a webinar and put it on YouTube, so it was accessible for them afterwards.

I’d say along similar lines—stop introducing products or resources or tools out of context. So, if you say there’s a great new tool you may consider using and you just show the tool but there’s no context for it, I think it’s going to be difficult to get teachers to buy-in because it just seems like one more thing.

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more on PD in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=professional+development