A Professional Learning Challenge

This week I finally received and read Catlin Tucker's new book, Power Up Blended Learning: A Professional Learning Infrastructure to Support Sustainable Change.  She shares that professional development should be practice based and that "all professional development should strive to employ the strategies it advocates." It seems simple enough and a no-brainer, but often that is not what we get from professional learning days.  We've all been there. We've attended and even facilitated "sit and get" learning sessions. 

This weekend, I was fortunate enough to attend the @RewireYou #Rewire Conference sponsored by Glenn Robbins and Barry Saide at Tabernacle Schools in New Jersey.  I attended Kate Baker's session on Flexible Learning Environment and Protocols for Flipped Learning called, "Get Flippin' in Here!"  The title alone sounds fun, right?

What I loved about her session is that while she was teaching us about flipped learning, we, the participants, were acting as students in an in-class flipped lesson.  Now, I do coach teachers on flipped learning, but being the student and actually getting a feel for what the learning is like for the student is a game-changer.  Experiencing the lesson from the student's point of view gives the participant a better idea of the impact of the lesson.  I believe this is true especially when we are introducing technology tools. 

In her presentation, Kate shared EdPuzzle and Formative.  EdPuzzle allowed for the videos to be viewed with a formative quiz at the end of the video.  The teacher, Kate, would receive our scores as well as how long we viewed the video and if we even viewed it at all. 

I challenge all of us to think about how we provide professional learning.  Do we want to passively "sit and get" or do we want participants to experience the learning as we challenge our teachers to teach every day?