Imagine: It’s early August, you’re sitting at home in your comfy chair, coffee in hand and a laptop nearby. Your school district has listened to its teachers and instead of making you earn your professional development for the year by sitting in sweltering (or freezing if they like turning the air conditioner up) auditoriums listening to some guy ramble about something that will not help you one bit in your classroom and will most likely increase your workload, they have given the English department the option of choosing online PD. And you (or your department head) has selected an online professional development course that will help you setup you and your students for yearlong success during the first month of school. You’re on the PD website and loading the course. What are your expectations?
I ask you to imagine this scenario because between grad school work (reading books and revising my short story), providing feedback to my students and making sure they’re all still OK, and helping my daughter with her distance learning, I have been creating a first-of-the-year PD course. Basically, I would provide the rationale for how I start out my school year to encourage students to develop a healthy mindset for engaging in a reading and writing journey both independently and as a community and the resources/materials to support you and your students in this process.
This mindset and the resources I provide will help start your class off on the right foot and provide the momentum you need to keep you going for the rest of the year.
The course would be provided online at the reThink ELA website and would also include Google/digital friendly/printable versions of all the materials I use with my students. This would include my materials for getting to know students, helping start their independent reading journeys, and more.
I have two questions though.
1. When I am providing a rationale or explaining a process, do you want video (like where you can see me talking and/or a screen recording) or would just an audio file be OK?
[crowdsignal poll=10541081]
Alternately, if you are a member of our RTE Facebook group, you can answer the poll and the question below by clicking this link.
2. How much would you and/or your school district be willing to pay for this and what would have to be included in the PD for it to be worth that price to you?
Just answer this question in the comments below…
I have no idea what my school will support. I teach English Language Development, so I use language acquisition materials, but, of course, I use authentic text so they can improve their reading and writing as well as their speaking and listening skills.