Building an Effective Teacher Professional Development Plan

In the education field, all teachers should have a teacher professional development plan and actively work on achieving the goals they have identified. A professional development plan for teachers is very necessary to put more attention to what can make their work much easier. By following the steps you have put in place, you should gain experience and develop the required skills.

For example, your goal may be to become a head of the department or a member of pastoral care, so you need to outline what you will do to gain this position in your plan. In this case, you need a technology which is software to help it out. Moreover, if you want to be an OSHA Inspector, you need to follow the guidelines and maintain a personal development plan to be eligible to check if employees have completed their OSHA 30 construction training.

A professional development plan for teachers is a documented record of an individual’s career aspirations and progressions. It may be referred to as a PDP or CPD, with the latter an abbreviation of continuing professional development. Within your plan, you should outline what you wish to achieve and what you are going to do to develop your workplace skills and therefore reach your goals.

All teachers should be actively working on their professional development. Making time for your own development may be a challenge, but your employer should encourage and support you to professionally develop yourself. So here are 5 techniques you need to know to build an effective teacher professional development plan.

Developing an Effective Teacher Professional Development Plan (PDP)

The techniques used to achieve professional development must be appropriate. A teacher development plan starts with creating a professional development plan that helps ensure learning objectives are met. This one would be easier with a School ERP system. The ERP for Schools system can create a healthy learning environment for students, maximize teacher performance, and engage parents in learning through an integrated platform. An effective teacher professional development plan should factor in elements such as:

Active learning

Hands-on and interactive training provides teachers with opportunities to directly engage in the types of learning activities they would be implementing in their classrooms. Active learning helps keep teachers engaged and allows for greater discernment and understanding of potential drawbacks and benefits.

Skill development

Another technique used to achieve professional development is the skill and competence development. Define the skills and knowledge necessary to understand any new teaching strategies or technology, and properly apply that knowledge within a classroom.

Support and coaching

Support and coaching involve direct communication with teachers about their individual support needs and sharing information to address teachers’ unique concerns. This step is very important to build a good teacher professional development plan (PDP).

Collaboration

Teachers should be able to exchange ideas and address barriers and challenges they encounter in their classrooms. These opportunities create spaces for teachers to collaborate on problem-solving by allowing them to share individual and collective knowledge among themselves.

Content-focused

Content-focused professional development is training that provides concrete solutions and information about specific teaching strategies, tools, or resources. Examples of content-focused professional development include: discussing a specific software program or mathematical technique and training teachers on the most effective methods of instruction around these topics.

How to Achieve your Development Goals

While you are likely to have professional development goals, the methods of improving your capabilities and achieving your goals are likely to be through similar means. Your development can take place in various forms. The most popular options are listed below, but other methods may be available to you at your school.

Qualification courses

You can gain professional qualifications by having completed either online or face-to-face training. Courses provide the practical information you need to then take action and develop yourself in the areas you have addressed. They will vary greatly in length and content, so it’s essential that you find the one that is best.

Mentoring and peer observation

You are guaranteed to learn something by shadowing your colleagues, whether they are of a higher level or not. You may witness teaching methods that successfully engage pupils with a difficult topic, or be able to take note of a particular strategy for managing disruptive pupils.

Both the observer and the teacher being shadowed are likely to benefit from peer observation. Therefore, by being observed by a colleague and given constructive feedback you could also develop yourself.

Observation visits to other schools

Visiting other schools will have a similar effect to shadowing your own colleagues, but is likely to also have additional learning benefits. For example, a different school may encourage different teaching strategies and behaviors. You can then take this knowledge back to your own school and try new ways of teaching.

Workshops

Workshops on a subject matter, methods, or other education-related topics are a useful platform for teachers to discuss their own experiences as well as learn. They may be led by an external specialist or hosted by one of the teachers. Such discussions also provide teachers with an opportunity for internal reflection. In this case, you might get a lot more out of this type of development than you’d expect.

Education conferences and seminars

This type of learning will allow you to develop in a particular area that you personally recognize as challenging. They also provide you with an opportunity to meet and discuss teaching methods and your own development with other teaching professionals.

Research

Your professional development is primarily your own responsibility. You may find that carrying out your own research, in the form of reading online materials such as reports, helps you to develop. Useful software includes the following modules that you need to achieve your development goals. You can also carry out research with your colleagues as a project. Or, you may find online communities of teachers, such as blogs, a useful means of developing yourself professionally.

The technology of Teacher Professional Development Plan Goals

A school can’t prepare students to use the tools of the future if it continues to use old technology. That’s why we bring in cutting-edge technology like software applications for students and teach 21st-century skills such as coding. When the teacher brings new technology, however, teacher development is critical. Educators not only need to know how to use technology in the classroom well enough to teach students, but they also need to be able to tie the technology into a unit of inquiry so that students learn to think and create as they learn the technology.

At HashMicro, we believe it’s important to push teachers to go beyond using technology for the sake of technology. When the teachers learn the technology, especially ERP software, we challenge them to find ways to work it into the curriculum in a way that enhances teaching and learning with the best school ERP system.

Conclusion

We’ve found that the best teachers are the ones who are constantly pushing themselves to learn about new research. A professional development plan for teachers is more than helping teachers become familiar with the basics of technology – you need an ongoing program to support, encourage, and inspire teachers to explore technology while giving them resources to make the most of it in the classroom. A teacher development plan is to help teachers become familiar with the basics of technology and school management software from HashMicro might be helpful to support the teachers in doing it.

HashMicro provides the best school management software to help all teachers in developing a professional development plan for teachers. All of our modules contribute to developing PDP and can be taken on any device at your own pace. Let’s move to HashMicro and download HashMicro’s school management software pricing scheme to help you develop your PDP. Get free demo now!

5 Techniques to Build an Effective Teacher Professional Development Plan