MEMBER VOICES
photo by s te v e smith
Desiree Alexander makes the case for personalizing professional learning.
Personalize professional learning to give teachers choice, empowerment By Desiree Alexander, Ed.S.
All educators have been there. You walk into a meeting and see a stranger at the front of the room. Someone else says, “Welcome to mandatory training.” You look at the agenda and see the topic is something you already know, don’t have any interest in or just don’t need right now. You ask the principal if you’ll ever get training on that one thing you really need to know. She tells you she doesn’t know, but not to forget the most important thing about this training – to sign in because, again, it’s mandatory. I must admit, I used to be that stranger at the front of the room and I always felt bad because I knew you were in my audience. I tried my best to differentiate so your time wasn’t wasted, but even as I taught, I knew there was a better way. Personalizing professional learning is one way to ensure this scenario never happens again. Development or learning
Many of us still use the term professional development (PD) because we’re familiar
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EMPOWERED LEARNER
with it, but the term professional learning (PL) is gaining steam because it more accurately reflects an approach that goes beyond developing as an individual. And adding “personalized” to the term professional learning is another way to evolve what has commonly become known as sitand-get learning. The end goal of a personalized PL experience is for the teacher to be able to use what’s learned to positively affect student achievement. Ideally, it involves teacher choice and empowerment. Educators should learn in the same way we want them to teach. One of the worst things is when someone tells you to be engaging and not teach all students the same way, while they’re teaching educators the same way! Personalized PL expects trainers to demonstrate or model how to teach. One of my favorite quotes is from Cameron Mattis, head of sales at Teachable. He says, “One moment of aha is worth hours of blah blah.” When teachers learn exactly what they need or want to know,
