Planning a PD for new staff can be down right scary, there’s no other way to say it. PD for new staff is when you can make that initial connection with new teachers that can make a difference in their year, and how they will receive the PD’s you give them in the future. Giving them too much and they won’t want to see you for a while, give them too little and they leave feeling their time could have best been spent their time elsewhere. With new teacher’s.. its just hard to gauge how much is too much.
One of the many lessons I’ve learned from planning PD’s over the years is its not a process that is easy to do on your own. Having a team to plan effective PD’s can make a difference from active learning to active eye rolling.
Over the summer I went through Apple’s AET certification with 3 other teachers from my district. (See AET Blog Post)
Using what we learned this summer, our team put together a new teacher PD that, to the surprise of our new teachers, didn’t focus on using much technology. We focused on the SAMR model, we used some iOS Apps with activities, but we didn’t teach how to use the apps. We also made sure our new teachers were comfortable with our on line grading system, and gave them plenty of resources that they district provides to help make them successful.
I really think the best activity we did with the new staff was…. To sit and listen to their thoughts, goals and concerns about technology. At the end of the day we made some great connections, learned more about our new staff members and initiated some possible activities to collaborate on during the year. All in all a very good day.