Switch Up Your Professional Learning Opportunities: What do you have to lose

We are always looking for ways in which to improve our skills, gather new information, or think about our professions from a slightly different angle. The road of Professional Development only starts when we submerge ourselves into learning and growing. It is for those reasons that finding the right ways in which to grow is very important. Today, We are going to talk about a less conventional route that could prove very beneficial.

Unexplored Development Paths To Try

It is always a great idea to try to make your understanding grow using the well-established ways that other professionals in your field are using, which are professional developments, conferences in areas of interest, and meet up groups with like-minded friends. After all, these are popular for a reason. You will be able to learn valuable skills and work on your professional network by brainstorming ideas and collaborating with others. At some point though, it may be very useful for your Professional Development to start investigating other ways to grow that are in a new direction. L. Porosoff (2020) suggests that it may be extremely useful to consider looking at learning opportunities outside our own fields. Think of it as uncharted territory, an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning. Let’s talk about a few of the benefits of this approach:

Breaking The Mold; Going Outside Of Your Comfort Zone

Educators are dynamic and although we love learning we tend to stay in our areas of expertise. When we force ourselves outside of our comfort zones we start to absorb information in a different way, and that stimulates our brains to find new connections to otherwise overlooked things. It will help us see in a different way things that we may already know, or even consider others that may be obvious to different professions but lacking in ours.

Here are five things we can do to switch things up in our classroom:

Co-collaborate with a university professor to create a partnership with a different department (We were able to collaborate with IGPS to see how professors used drones to create maps for uncharted territory)
Take a Class- now with the opportunity of MOOCS, and Online courses we can explore how art can curriculum can intermix. (We had a start-up company (like wine & canvas) come to class and explained value in the art which we were going over the definition of value in math on how one defines value in paintings vs. quality.
Team-Teach a lesson with a new subject area- Once we collaborated with the music teacher and we were able to learn how music and technology combined, later on, we went to visit a studio to actually see how it worked when it was edited and put together.
Competition- We had a contest on who can create the best rap about a concept (we had students rapping about Chemistry, English, and Art concepts which was fun practice for our summative assessments.
Personal Passion in the classroom- We had a teacher who loved to play the piano so for lunch she played for us 1x per week. She eventually taught piano as an elective allowing her to get paid for her passion.

Start Exploring Now!

So maybe your professional development path is well defined within your profession, but going outside for knowledge will not be very common, and therefore, harder to follow. You will need to make a lot of choices for yourself. It is a good idea (L. Porosoff, 2017) to start exploring within your sphere of interest in fields such as wellness, design, or politics for example. All of these fields will have relevant information to your own while giving you a fresh perspective. Just start small and try to find something that interests you and you feel may be applicable to your everyday task. Try to find overarching concepts and ideas that will propel you to better professional performance.

References

EdSurge. (2021, February 09). How teachers are learning: Professional development remix - edsurge guides. Retrieved February 25, 2021, from https://www.edsurge.com/research/reports/how-teachers-are-learning-professional-development-remix

L. Porosoff, (2020) Jailbreak Your Pd (https://kappanonline.org/jailbreak-professional-development-pd-educators-porosoff/)

Porosoff, L. & Weinstein, J. (2017). EMPOWER your students: Tools to inspire a meaningful learning experience. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.