Last year our school decided to provide some Professional Development to faculty heads. It included some stuff on having those difficult conversations, which I found worthwhile, and some talk of meeting protocols and accountability amongst other things. Most of it was worthwhile.  We had 3 sessions overall, spread over about 6 months, two of them run by former Principal Ian Wallis. One issue that almost all the faculty heads mentioned was poor attendance by some staff at faculty meetings. Ian suggested an overhaul of our meetings. Start with some PD he said, and leave those items that sometimes generate circular, unproductive, discussion to the end ‘they’ll wrap those up pretty quickly when they see it’s 4:30′ he said.

I’d been trying to include some PD type activities into our meetings when I didn’t run out of time, so this idea really struck me as something to try (along with the suggestion to provide some food). So far it has undoubtably been a success. Personally, I prefer to call it professional learning, which I hope will lead to professional development of staff. We spend the first 20 – 30 mins of the hour meeting on this learning – I have modelled Number Talks (Jo Boaler, Ruth Parker); we’ve decided where we individually fit on the American Indian Leadership Wheel; have looked at Highlighting Mistakes Grading Strategy  (teaching channel)  and today we explored Desmos’ Marbleslides. Part of the school’s strategic goals this year is continued learning about and implementation of NPDL – New Pedagogies for Deep Learning, so these activities all reflect some aspect of the 6Cs of NPDL: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, Critical Thinking, Character & Citizenship. Since this change, attendance, and engagement in the meeting is undoubtably up. Today we had a full house, teachers were deeply engaged in the desmos task, as they were in the Number Talks and other previous activities. They were participating as students, collaborating with each other to solve the problems, sharing suggestions and reflecting on how the NPDL goals were met by activities such as this. There was a real buzz in the room, something that was definitely missing from our meetings of the past. It was hard to get them to stop when we needed to get to some of the less motivating, but necessary aspects of the meeting. I just wish someone had suggested this to me 4 years ago, but better late than never.