Creating a PD toolkit is a great idea. It helps to have a variety of resources available to choose from and to share with colleagues. Sometimes, though, I feel like I’m drowning in too many resources. It’s like the book The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. Schwartz argues that providing too many choices can cause anxiety and lead to unhappiness. We need autonomy to make decisions, but many times our ability to make informed decisions, at least from a consumer standpoint, is not typically based on empirical evidence, but rather anecdotal evidence (word of mouth) or packaging. Sometimes I feel like educational resources are the same way. So I didn’t spend a lot of time reviewing exactly what I put in, but I tried to include topics related to educational equity, assessment, and universal design for learning.
I am glad that this site pares down the topics and organizes the information into distinct categories for educators. Having some resources was helpful. Unfortunately, many of the resources I was searching for were not live. I was directed to many resources that were no longer in existence. Also, I felt like the variety of resources included here and on the website ranged from government publications to personal websites making it challenging to evaluate the quality of the sites.
Nevertheless, I personally feel that PD is a responsibility of schools and school leaders. The make up of class populations and student generations differs and continues to diversify and grow. Chances are that today’s corps of teachers are going to be culturally different from the students they teach, and they will possibly come from different social-economic backgrounds than their students as well. Teachers may not be as prepared to address these issues of incongruity in the classroom, and as a result, need better preparation and ongoing development in best practices and differentiating their instruction to meet their students’ needs. I also feel like it is important to add some urgency to address these issues of inequity in schools, especially in urban schools, where PD may be centered around test preparation or other tasks associated more with administrative duties.
Thus, I included a resource for addressing the digital divide, an article on improving differentiation strategies, leveling the playing field for K-12 Online Education, a resource for improving reading through technology, and a tool to enable leaders and teachers to examine and assess where they are on a technology implementation scale.
When I was creating this toolkit, I was thinking about my own experiences with PD and teaching, and the current group of teachers I work with. Many of them are excellent teachers, but there are definitely some teachers that I observe that struggle with adapting to the changing demographics of students. I also see other teachers struggle to teach and differentiate their practices to adjust to individual student needs. This ends up, in some cases, causing confrontations and other management issues in the classroom, at least from what I have observed. In working with some of these teachers, they are very receptive to new ideas and practices, especially when they are specific and given some kind of practical application of the strategy or approach. What I think trips up some teachers is when we talk in generalities or throw terms around like “differentiation” without giving any specific or concrete examples of how the teachers can accomplish these actions. I think that finding more specific and concrete examples and resources will help teachers grow and develop.
bshevory 