Who would be involved in the PD program?
All teachers would be a part of the PD, irrespective of the grade and the subject that they teach. But especially teachers of early years would be, as STEM needs to start right from childhood. It is in the early years that the play is mostly in the minds of the students and if nurtured by STEM, it stays on.
Teachers of all subjects would be there in order to facilitate sessions on inter-disciplinary work. As the E of STEM, the EDP or Engineering Design Process is the cycle that all need to be able to learn and implement.
Who would facilitate and who would engage in the PD?
Facilitation would be at 2 levels which are (a) experts in STEM and (b) practitioners of STEM. Experts in STEM can open new tracks for all of us with new windows of thought. Practitioners of STEM can show us how the new tracks can be implemented in the classroom in various ways.
What professional development activities would occur?
Several professional development activities can be used to facilitate the program such as (a) workshops by experts, (b) peer observation of classes, (c) sharing of lessons, (d) collaborative planning with facilitation and (e) analyzing student work in teams.
What types of models would you use (e.g., traditional workshops, learning communities, etc.)?
However, for me, all roads lead to the development of a PLC, Professional Learning Community. Once teachers understand that developing others is the same as developing themselves, we have arrived at a PLC. Teachers should collaborate to analyze student work and also, if the environment permits, video their own classes and share (Barchenger & Peterman, 2015).
PLC or Professional Learning Committee consists of a team of teachers that come together, online or offline or both and learn (Fulton, & Britton, 2011).
Over what length of time would the PD program continue?
There are two types of the PD programs. (a) Formal, which is sporadic workshops by experts. (b) And informal, that is continuous work by the teachers in the school. I don’t think that either will ever stop. Both would go hand in hand and maybe at some point, the external workshops would be far between. But the informal work would continue forever. The work of developing a PLC does not ever end.
How would you ensure that teachers apply what they learned in the PD?I don’t think that having PD sessions alone would be enough. It needs to be tempered with accountability among the teachers. This can be done in many ways. Some of which are:
(a) Teacher sharing the lessons
(b) STEM exhibitions and
(c) STEM competition
How would you plan for sustaining the PD program in the future?There is a shortage of qualified STEM teachers (Ejiwale, 2013). The training is minimal. Investment in teacher PD is not something lucrative by most schools.
In such an environment, I would like to create a system that sustains STEM PD in schools. Teacher train teacher sessions can ensure that a cycle of teachers are always working towards training new and upcoming teachers. I would have a TTT – Teacher Train Teachers program running continuously in a school.
References
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