Thoughts on Professional Development
One of our main activities here over the years has been focused on providing training. There has been a disturbing trend over the last five or six years, however, of attendance slowly trailing off.
As I’ve spoken with participants, it turns out that one of the major reasons is that it is increasingly difficult to get release time to take a workshop during the school day. Almost grudglingly, I’ve tried an experiment this year and have started scheduling workshops in the evenings and on weekends.
Nuts. It’s working!
Actually, it’s kind of exciting to have people turning out for workshops again. It means I can take the time to put together some of the tranings I’ve really wanted to do. I’m getting ready to add a new podcasting workshop, more on digital storytelling, and other fun topics. (Sometimes the only way I get time to learn new stuff is to schedule myself to teach about it.)
If you’re from around these parts, you can see what we’ve scheduled by going to our registration website. The next update of classes will happen on February 1 for our spring and summer classes. You can find the other ESDs from this part of our website. And of course, if you are interested in something you don’t see, email me at cmcquinn (at) psesd.org!