Personalized Professional Development
In her fourth prediction from the iNACOL post on 12/31/15, Susan Patrick believes that teachers will start micro-credentialing and having much more say in how they utilize their professional development time. She believes that teachers will have highly personalized PD, similar to the next-gen learning model for students.
I am hopeful that this will become the wave of the future; however, there will need to be some fundamental shifts that happen so that teachers are allowed to do this. First, and foremost, teachers will need to be trusted to manage their own learning. Currently, professional development looks like a typical 1900's school room with one or two people presenting the information that every single teacher in the school must implement. This is regardless of whether you teach music, PE, world-language or industrial arts.
In my time in the classroom, I was never a core subject area teacher and the professional development that was pushed down couldn't always be applied to the subjects I taught, such as high school Spanish. I resigned my K-12 position right before my daughter turned one and stumbled into my current position. I started part-time and worked my way to full-time, but the freedom I have for professional development is amazing. I also retain a lot more by looking into information for myself and then doing things like blogging about it or tweeting about it. Also, just like with students, it's more meaningful because it's personalized.
In the K-12 world, PD is still connected to seat time and teachers in the state of Iowa have to have 16 hours of seat time of Professional Development annually. For next-gen PD to happen there will need to be more voice and choice for teachers too. In addition, it might change how teachers receive licensure and renew their teaching licenses in the next decade. Unfortunately, there is a lot of bureaucratic red tape that stands in the way of being able to do this on a large scale, but I am hopeful that we will see the change Patrick predicts.
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