Establishing a Continuous Professional Learning Culture 1
Establishing a Continuous Professional Learning Culture
Autumn Dickerson
Grand Canyon University: EAD513
July 8, 2020
Establishing a Continuous Professional Learning Culture 2
All professional development that will be attended by using PD funds will have to be
submitted to our instructional partner and approved by the principal. The requested PD
opportunity will be evaluated to determine the relevance and projected growth for all teachers. If
your PD is approved, you will have a week from the day you return to submit all handouts along
with a rationale of the PD to the instructional partner. Once the instructional partner is able to
review what you have submitted you will schedule a time to meet with her and begin planning to
present during a session at our districts annual ED Camp. ED Camp is hosted during the last
quarter of each school year in order for teachers to share what they have learned at the various
professional development opportunities that they have attended. Handouts from your
presentation will be available to anyone who attended, and the instructional partner will also
upload copies to the schools OneDrive so that anyone who would like to implement the
strategies from your presentation will have access to them at as needed.
If you are a teacher that has not received tenure or you are in your cycle for evaluation,
you will have to pick three strategies that you learned from ED camp to implement within you
class. You will receive two observations; one will be schedule and one will be unannounced.
You will be able to pick your third form of proving that the strategies that you have decided to
implement are working. Examples of a third form of proof would be video taping a lesson and
allowing a colleague to provide feedback, recording a lesson and submitting a thorough self-
reflection, or requesting a third observation. Within two weeks of the observation, you will
receive written results of your evaluation. At the end of the evaluation will be a time and date for
you to meet with the principal and instructional partner. If the results of your evaluations are not
in good standing, you will be given an opportunity to schedule sessions with your department
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head and the instructional partner to provide you with further education in the areas you feel
would fit best within your classroom.
Rationale
Standard six of the Professional Standards of Educational Leaders discusses the professional
capacity and practice of school personnel as it goes towards the academic well being of our
students (NPBEA 2015). Professional Development provides our teachers with opportunities to
further educate themselves on the latest technology and strategies that are benefitting out
students within the classroom. Education is an ever changing field and the demands for our
students as they prepare for life after high school changes also. It is important that our teachers
are equipped with the proper tools to prepare their students for life outside of the classroom by
applying what they learn. Our goal is to have teachers view their own professional learning and
as part of an ongoing, collaborative, peer-to-peer process, and to increase the home-to-school
connection in their classrooms (Kaldor & Donohue 2018). By requiring a PD request to be
approved we are ensuring that the funds spent for this particular opportunity will be beneficial to
multiple educators. It is a goal to maximize every opportunity that we are given as a staff. This is
why we host an ED Camp so that our PD opportunities among other learning opportunities for
the classroom can be shared. Asking the teacher to present at the ED Camp also allows them to
grow as an overall educator. It is one thing to teach children, but a completely different
experience teaching your peers. Literally requiring implementation of the strategies presented at
ED camp is an accountability factor. This isn’t just another event that you get to attend and put
on the shelf with no purpose. The evaluation factors are for the teacher to receive feedback on
their implantation of what they learned and chose to bring into their classroom. We would never
want something to be implemented incorrectly, so the feedback factor is very important. I am
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one who believes in grace, so it is important to me to create an opportunity for them to dig
deeper into what they feel in needed within their classroom. The outcome may even end up being
that the strategy just isn’t the right fit.
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References
Kaldor, T., & Donohue, C. (2018). Tech Enabled Educators: Engagement and Empowerment
through Professional Development. Exchange (19460406), 240, 36-40.
National Policy Board for Educational Administration (2015). Professional Standards for
Educational Leaders 2015. Reston, VA: Author.
