Dive Brief:
- Schools have quickly jumped onto the bandwagon of project-based learning, finding it to be a good way to engage and empower learners, and the Shanghai American School has begun using the same strategy in professional development.
- Andrew Miller, the school’s instructional coach, writes for Edutopia that districts should keep all the PBL essentials in place for professional development approach — the project should focus on authentic work and problems, there should be a process for critique and reflection, and an overarching driving question should drive learning.
- Teachers should set their own goals and learning targets for the project or have some other way to use their own “voice and choice,” and, like with student projects, teachers should get to participate in some type of culminating event.
Dive Insight:
Educators spend a lot of time trying to find ways to make classroom experiences more engaging for students. With better engagement comes better chances of comprehension and long-term learning and its related effects on academic achievement. Yet with all the changes in good classroom pedagogy, professional development often sticks to traditional methods that many teachers find boring.
Besides taking a note from the PBL playbook in professional development, schools can also consider the opportunities for flipped learning. The Montour School District in Pennsylvania is one of the districts that has done this. The Montour Learning Network provided a platform from which to operate the flipped learning and prompted a 600% increase in digital PD participation.