Professional learning and development are essential for improving student achievement. It’s challenging for teachers to keep abreast of technological advances independently. Professional Learning bridges the gap between teacher knowledge and current practice.
Professional learning and development should happen with teachers and should foster collegiality and collaboration.
Teachers and teacher quality are having the most significant impact on students’ achievement, and thus professional learning and development are essential in ensuring successful outcomes for New Zealand students.
Teacher efficacy has the most influential positive impact on student achievement (Hattie, 2012). Educators with high effectiveness show greater effort and persistence, a willingness to try new teaching approaches, set more challenging goals, and attend more closely to the needs of students who require extra assistance.
Also, when collective efficacy is present, school staff are better equipped to foster positive behaviour in students and in raising students’ expectations of themselves by convincing them that they can do well in school.
Targeted school-wide professional learning and development are key to increasing teacher efficacy, both at an individual teacher level and at a collective, school-wide level.
Upskilling your staff won’t just make their lives easier, it will also improve learning outcomes for your students – and save you money in the long term.
Our Professional Learning and Development (PLD) uses the Critical Friends and Mentor models, both robust frameworks based on sound evidence.
Buddies and mentors work together to empower and encourage each other, building on the digital fluency that already exists in your school and growing capacity at every level.
Professional learning programmes starts with a planning session – we’ll work with school leadership to establish the professional learning model best suited to you and your school.
It may include:
In bespoke on-site sessions, we’ll help your teachers increase their skills, knowledge and confidence in working with your specific systems and technology.
The fun, hands-on sessions are concentrated around short tasks that encourage exploration and discussion. They’re also not reliant on teacher release time – our facilitators work within the school environment.
Your teachers will have help pairing up and working to encourage and stretch one another. This may mean acting as a sounding board for new ideas, helping hold one another accountable and focused on learning, and offering support. They’ll do this by observing and modelling new teaching techniques in class.
Our facilitators will support the Critical Friends process by demonstrating best practice teaching, modelling and observing.
Locally Focussed PLD is fully funded through the MoE and can help reduce your school’s IT costs in the long term. By upskilling your people’s digital fluency, you’ll reduce your reliance on one or two experts, and on IT support.
All of our professional learning facilitators are Ministry of Education accredited – that means that we can deliver Locally-Focussed PLD and help you with your proposal.
Your PLD will be led by facilitators who are well versed in the particular needs and challenges of the course participants. Your facilitator will also always be:
Choose from the following professional learning options:
Schools, ask us about locally-focussed PLD
Steve visited our school to do some PLD, and we didn’t have any relievers to release staff. He arranged to run workshops in classrooms with the teacher observing him modelling digital technology ideas with the children in the class. This proved to be very successful, as evidenced by the enthusiastic response from teachers as well as students going home and giving their parents lessons about what they had learned. Teachers, watching Steve at work, realised how easy it was to teach simple concepts through drawing out the ideas from children and then putting the ideas into practice through interactive activities and that’s even before using any IT devices or equipment.
- Tim Hocquard, Principal, Waipukurau School
