Just came out of a Professional Development Planning meeting (okay so that was last week 🙂 – our job was to take some linear charts and put together a cohesive professional development plan that could be taken to our senior leadership in the near future. Easy peasy eh…

Task: Continuous Faculty Development Pathway that focuses on Faculty competencies and the topics/areas that faculty have expressed a desire to engage in:

• Inclusive Educational Assessment
• Inclusive Classroom Management
• Blended Learning
• Learning Technologies
• International Initiative

Each one of these topics has another linear chart outlining how the topic could be addressed and developed, who the champions for the topic were, etc., etc., Finally the notion of when to launch this new initiative…. and the wild and wonderful discussion ensued…

The biggest part of our discussions revolved around e-portfolios and encouraging faculty and staff to begin to develop their portfolios and model the practice for their students. This conversation reminded me of the conversation that has taken place on twitter a few times about digital footprints, how to develop one and be easy to find (googleable) so that connections and conversations can happen naturally and easily. This discussion led into… well you get the idea…

Continuous Faculty Development is a different way to describe personal learning networks and professional learning. Something that is very hard to define simply using words without sounding like a tv evangelist. There are no right ways to set this type of learning or activity up but there are definately wrong ways.

Professional development of this nature can not be mandated or enforced. It will be difficult to report back on and provide statistics for and it will be hard not to make it sound like a flavour of the month initiative. But we know it’s important. Our discussion were filled with words like transformative, holistic, intangible, powerful, motivating and engaging.

We decided we needed to take a grassroots approach instead of an official launch (the notion of a launch induced winces from all of us – all three of us 🙂 We’d start by having conversations with folks. We tossed around the idea of a book club. We’d begin by sharing our own experiences with others through conversations and demonstrations. Invite other folks to come down to talk and share…

We want to have a focussed conversation with our management that are ‘mandating’ the training and development that has been mapped out in a linear chart format. We want that conversation to be the starting place…

We’ve decided to reach out to our own networks and invite folks to help us figure this out, share in those conversations and be the outside experts that internal folks may enjoy hearing from and talking to.

Got any suggestions or anything you’d like to share?