Top 5 Professional Development Activities for Collaboration

This article outlines five ways to bolster educational collaboration with professional development.

Formative
Editorial Team
August 9, 2022
Resources

A belief many hold about professional development activities is that they don't privilege reflection and action. Educators want their work outside of the classroom to matter as much as their time with students but as a National School Boards Association report notes, “most teachers aren’t given the kind of professional development that would actually help them.”

However, educators and trust leaders have a powerful tool when looking to bolster their PD: types of collaboration. When discussing educational matters, working together can have a big impact. Collaboration brings “a safety net; it helps you catapult your thinking and develop ideas that may seem crazy at first.” With this concept in mind, here are five ways to supercharge PLCs with PD collaboration!

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Unlocking the Power of Formative Assessment

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Unlocking the Power of Formative Assessment

Join us live to learn about Formative’s enriched premium product features and how to develop a data-driven school culture to drive positive student outcomes, explore how to give educators a space to collaborate on student activities, and discover how to elevate and influence instruction and assessment trust-wide.

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  • Collaborative Curriculum Development. The best classes don’t always emerge in a vacuum. Team collaboration around curriculum is a great way to deepen knowledge of a subject matter. In real time, members of a PLC can receive real-time feedback in order to identify gaps in their learning environments and incorporate new trends into their individual plans, resources, and tools.
  • Coaching / Classroom Visitations. Educators who don’t limit their experiences to their own classrooms know how powerful it can be to see their peers in action. Visiting other classrooms - or even schools - provides an eye-opening glimpse into other styles of teaching, learning, and administrative policy. Observing these different systems inspires educators to bring new problem-solving skills and teaching methods to their primary learning spaces, especially if teachers work with coaches to help apply these observations to their primary learning spaces. 
  • Continuing Education and Conferences. These programs can help educators grow and level-set learning opportunities within a structured PD environment. Continuing-education classes train teachers on the latest pedagogical and instructional strategies, while conferences help to immerse educators and trust leaders in themed discussions on a variety of subjects, including mentoring new teachers, focusing on student growth, and the future of education.
  • School/Trust Implementation Plans. For something as challenging as integrating a trust’s prescribed implementation plan, it helps to work alongside people with different perspectives and strengths. These plans unite you with fellow educators as you brainstorm cross-campus processes and even professional development strategies. Doing so allows for diversity of thinking, wider creativity, and increased productivity.
  • Data Analysis. Analyzing data can yield important results about classroom efficacy. When members of a PLC, school, or even trust do this work together, they become aware of larger variables and trends impacting the student body. Those trends affect how students and teachers approach course materials as well as the outside factors playing additional roles. Programs like Google Classroom can help educators examine and synthesize student data from a number of demographics.
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Webinar

Formative Assessment as the Foundation of your Assessment System

Join experts Ryan Clark and Shawn McCusker in a 45-minute webinar, exploring the transformative power of formative assessment in the digital age. Register today to elevate your teaching and learning methodologies with Formative.

Webinar

Formative Assessment as the Foundation of your Assessment System

Join experts Ryan Clark and Shawn McCusker in a 45-minute webinar, exploring the transformative power of formative assessment in the digital age. Register today to elevate your teaching and learning methodologies with Formative.

Learn More

As educators, we need to develop long term skills and expose ourselves to new concepts. Successful collaborations turn professional development from an obligation into an asset! 

Additional Resources:

Check out the following resources for more tips on professional development!

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