Wilmington+Friends+School

Team members

 * ~ First Name ||~ Last Name ||~ Position ||
 * Gregg || Miller || Director of Technology (leader) ||
 * Eric || Rizzi || US computer and math ||
 * Sarah || Stock Patterson || US math ||
 * Margo Govatos || Stein || LS 4th grade lead ||
 * Brian || Fahey || LS 5th grade lead ||
 * John || Hanson || MS Social Science ||

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//The purpose of our project was to examine our current professional development program and ideally, enhance professional development in the future. We discovered that while our program afforded us the ability to have a lot of different experiences, there was little, if any, consistency or continuity. Further, there was no means to catalog our experiences or to share what we'd learned with the rest of our faculty.// =====

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// We discovered that there really wasn't a "program" so to speak. We had a lot of diverse grant opportunities and avenues for funding, but this was dependent upon individual initiative with no overall school coordination. There was no means to catalog experiences or a formal method to share ideas with our community. We thought that most of the experiences seemed “reactionary” and disconnected. //=====

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// Our goal was to improve professional development at our school both for the people who pursued PD and our community as a whole. We wanted to form a professional development committee that would coordinate experiences in order to have a more consistent program. We were successful in our objective as a newly formed committee was approved and implemented by our administration. We developed 11 different responsibilities for this committee. We will be able to determine how successful we were as the committee works through the list and hopefully adopts or addresses each responsibility. //=====

11/22/10 - discussed various ideas for PLP project
11/29/10 - determined that professional development was a significant need at the school 12/15/10 - we decided to do true Action Research by splitting up the tasks among our group. Each person was to research and find examples of professional development from our school, other schools, businesses, etc. We also started brainstorming about what worked with our current system, what didn't work with the system, as well as what our ideal PD program would look like. 1/1/11-2/20/11 - we each collected our data, posted it to a shared Google Docs Collection. We read articles posted by each other, current school policies, and found and joined a NING dedicated to PD. 2/22/11 - we had a 1/2 day retreat where we discussed and eventually drafted our ideal PD situation. We quickly realized that we would need to have a committee developed and began to list responsibilities that this committee might assume. 3/7/11 - our team leader met with our Head of School to inform him of our goal of having a PD committee. This conversation was productive and was well received by the HOS. He suggested that we meet with Division Heads next. 3/14/11 - our team leader met with Division Heads to talk about our idea and what our next steps would be. The Division Heads and Head of School agreed that the committee was warranted and that our 11 responsibilities were valid. They decided to announce this formation to the whole staff and ask for volunteers. 3/15/11 - The Assistant Head of School for Academics sent an all staff email describing this committee and asking for volunteers. 4/5/11 - Three of the six PLP members were assigned to the new 6 member Professional Development Committee. They are going to bring our 11 responsibilities to the committee for review and hopefully, adoption.

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One of the primary responsibilities of this committee as assigned by our administrative team is to determine if the committee should be an ongoing committee. We will evaluate our success as this committee continues and as some (or all) of our recommended responsibilities are adopted. =====

**Artifacts and Documentation**
[|Our Final Google Doc (listing our completed professional development ideas and 11 responsibilities)]

[|Our Professional Development Library (just a start, with entries from PLP members)]

[|Our whole Google Folder (that let us share ideas, etc.)]