PDS Keynote: It Takes two to Tango

The first keynote of the National Association of Professional Development Schools conference was Donna Cullen from Howard County Schools (MD). Donna focused on the nine essentials of Professional Development Schools and debriefed them with examples from her own work between Howard County and 5 universities…yes 5 universities!

The work shared by her focused really on the reciprocity between stakeholders: university faculty, k-12 faculty, university students, k-12 students. The need to meet everyone’s needs and come to a common agreement or consensus is “mission critical.”

From an instructional design background, my thoughts immediately come to a needs analysis, where schools and universities come together, identify needs, and then choose which needs or gaps they are going to address with a partnership. This is an ongoing process that needs to be revisited– it’s not enough for a needs analysis to happen once, do years or decades of work and then much later on revisit it. Rather, the need for constantly analyzing and evaluating progress is definitely needed!

Presentation: Supporting mathematics teaching and learning

Here are the slides from my presentation with 2nd grade teacher Torrieann Dooley about our collaboration to support mathematics teaching and learning.

Presentation: Support student teachers through a PDS seminar

In the fall 2008 semester, Dr. Joyce Frazier at UNC Charlotte ran a PDS seminar for student teachers that covered logistics to student teaching. This presentation shares the details of the seminar and some survey data. Here are the slides for the presentation.

Professional Development Schools Directors Talk

This morning at the Director’s Forum of the National Association for Professional Development Schools conference, directors of PDS’ shared their issues, struggles and stories. A number of issues that came up:

1) In order to ‘convince’ faculty to participate in school-univeristy partnerships, there is a need for various perks– accomplishing research and service simultaneously, course releases, and benefits for faculty-school partnerships. How can we get more faculty involved?

2) Are we making a difference? The impact of PDS’ on teacher and student learning still needs more evidence to answer research questions. Politically, this becomes messy…how we do this reasearch without setting up criticism for non-PDS or PDS schools?

3) How do we ‘scale up’ successful PDS initiatives? If something works in a PDS, how do we scale it up so that others can benefit as well?
Just some initial thoughts…

Professional Development Schools…if you could make the “ideal” partnership…

So as I sit here at the airport heading to the National Professional Development School conference in Daytona Beach, FL, I am procrastinating from grading and writing (go figure) and trying to think about some of the “big questions” I want answered there.

Last year as a “newbie” in the professional development scene, my main work was to figure out what the whole PDS thing is all about, attend some key speakers and really network to see how things are done at various schools, colleges and departments of education. This year, with a year of this PDS assistant coordinator-ship under my belt…I’m struck with some of the following questions:

1) where is the current research now on examining the impact of PDS partnerships on student learning? I know it’s broad and vast and a monster to tackle, but I feel the need for some large-scale studies to examine this.

2) With 21st century skills on everyone’s brain in North Carolina, how can PDS parternships support the infusion of 21st century skills in teacher education programs and K-12 schools?

3) Have any initiatives been done to attempt to facilitate PD for K-12 teachers simultaneously with teacher candidates in a teacher education program?

4) How have PDS programs embraced the idea of Professional Learning Communities? How have programs seen the two in terms of overlap and differences?

Just some ideas to wrap my head around over the next few days…