No, You Don’t Need to Buy Professional Development Software
How schools and teacher teams can hack Kiddom for PD
We think about about professional development (PD) a lot at Kiddom. We believe PD should be innovative, exploratory, and tied to teacher goals.
But so often at conferences or schools, our team hears teachers lamenting the number of dry lectures about decontextualized strategies they are forced to sit through.
In a 2009 report, the School Redesign Network at Stanford University found these characteristics to be most important in creating high-quality PD:
- Focused on Content
- Active, engaged learning
- Collaborative
- Uses Modeling
- Coaching from experts
- Opportunities for feedback and reflection
- Sustained over time
At Kiddom, we help teachers take charge and lead professional development for and with each other by allowing you to build digital sessions to meet those requirements. Benefits of developing your PD resources using Kiddom include:
- Flexibility: It can be impossible to find time to sit down together. With resources accessible online, teachers can access them when and where they want, instead of trying to cram learning into their only free period. Use your lunch break to eat or take a walk… learn when you’re ready!
- Accessibility: Materials are stored in the classes until you archive them — they can be used and referenced over time, instead of getting lost in a pile of handouts on your desk.
- Engagement: Your colleagues can ask you questions, or send you back attachments to share additional student work, reflections, or feedback. Learning is a dialogue!
- Transparency: If you’re an administrator or instructional coach and want to provide targeted feedback, you can align materials to standards like ISTE’s or your own school’s goals for teachers. Help them improve by clearly defining growth areas.
Getting started
Define your goal: Do you want teachers to learn a new skill, explore new content, or reflect on their practice? Set a learning objective to guide your materials. Make a new class in Kiddom with a related title.
Collect your resources: Add these as assignments to topical playlists in your Planner.
You might include:
- Articles about the topic to ground teachers in common understanding
- Videos, lesson plans, and student work from exemplar classes to model best practices
- Case studies from other schools
- Data protocols for individual reflection on student achievement
- New curriculum materials for review and discussion
Share: Send your colleagues the class code from your settings, and ask them to join the class as students with a username. They should keep their student accounts separate from their teacher ones. When a new colleague joins your class, select them from the drop down menu in your timeline, drag and drop the resources from your Planner, and they’ll have access to the materials.
Want to access sample PD curriculum? Ask me for it!
Part of an educator community seeking to collaborate more effectively? Our Pilot School Program could be the answer: learn more.
