Learning and Leading - March/April 2013

Benefits

As you implement your PDMS, you’ll start to see benefits at many levels.

Students learn from and with teachers who apply practices that have been shown to improve student achievement based on evidence collected in the PDMS. Teachers can easily track their own hours/credits for recertification, salary movement, and teaching status. The result is a dynamic portfolio of all of their formal and informal learning in one place, and they have a forum for engaging in online collaborative dialogue with colleagues.

Building leaders benefit by easily reviewing professional learning requests online. Principals are able to stay on top of what staff is learning to guide leadership conversations based on data. And learning leaders can identify which kinds of professional development have an impact so they can replicate and scale those approaches.

Central office administrators can save time and money using an online PDMS instead of paper and pencil methods. The PDMS allows a district to collect and analyze data from surveys, evaluation forms, and myriad reports to inform accurate and timely decision making and to track financial expenditures by budget code.

Our PDMS has allowed me to align my professional learning requests to our district’s strategic goals, around student outcomes, and my own personal learning goals. As a district leader, I recognize that my role has shifted from providing professional development to

Learning Plans

At the conclusion of a learning event, I complete an electronic reflection form in MyLearningPlan, documenting what I learned as well as my plans for applying that learning in my practice and my expected outcomes in terms of my work’s effect on teacher practice and student learning.

I also used the system to pilot a new professional learning measures tool. As principals gather data from the tool, they use this information to create annual learning plans for each building. The plan is the formative process within the PDMS that allows us to incorporate student and educator learning needs as well as evaluation measures into a comprehensive plan that ulti-

Thinking Teachers Teaching Thinkers

to thoughtfully gather, create, and review learning materials and resources to develop comprehensive professional learning plans and to figure out how you’ll use other configurable parts of the system. After you have done this, identify key milestones, including the date when all workflow and processes happen online.

creating structures and a culture that supports job-embedded professional learning with the school as the hub and our PDMS as our partner in that work.