Professional Development

I haven’t had much experience with professional development, but the few times I have gone to a meeting, I’ve found it extraordinarily helpful. As a student teacher, it allowed me to get to know some of the other teachers in the building and what they were teaching, and really gave me a great sense of the community I was working with. In my future occupations, I think this will be a great opportunity for me to make those important connections with my peers.

The professional development meeting I sat in on was really discussion based. This was really great because I got to not only get to know a lot about the teachers, but I learned about their teaching styles and different techniques they us in their classrooms. The questions that lead our discussion brought up a lot of critical points, most of which I was familiar with. Those ones I wasn’t familiar with though were really relevant to what was happening in the school and education in general. It was nice to hear the topics I had previously discussed, because it brought those ideas to the front of my mind and made me truly reinvestigate them.

I haven’t observered much of this, but I’ve often heard that professional development in schools can often focus more around core academics. This can make it hard to relate topics because art education is such a different type of learning environment. I’ve also noticed a lot of teachers don’t take professional development seriously. I was very excited to go to professional development at my observing schools, but was kind of disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm. All of the topics we discussed were relevant to bettering everyone, and it felt like some teachers didn’t feel that way and didn’t participate much.