Building Connection at Provincial Pro-D Day

The artifact.

Friday, October 23 was the Provincial Professional Development day. I participated in the Provincial Specialists’ Association (PSA) Pro-D day, specifically with BC Teachers of English Language Arts (BCTELA).

Due to COVID regulations, the conference was conducted entirely on the Zoom platform. I expected this to limit the interactions I would have with other teachers and teacher candidates (TCs), but the reality was entirely different.

I made a point to live-Tweet my notes from each of the three sessions I attended. The first was Kelly Gallagher’s keynote session on Building Adolescent Readers. The second was Roxanne Pope’s workshop on Inclusive Assessment Practices. The third session was with Shelley Moore, Penny Carnrite, and Jo Chrona on Curriculum Design with Accessibility in Mind. The result was a cascade of retweets, likes, and engagement with the workshop hosts themselves. On the Twitter platform, I felt empowered, appreciated, and seen, even as a TC. How rewarding!

Furthermore, during the sessions themselves, I interacted openly and comfortably with other teachers (and co-hosts) in the chat bar. We extended our learning from the workshop themselves by asking questions, exchanging resources, and building each other up with encouragement and shared experiences. The BCTELA team ended up making a new Facebook group as a result of the sharing that occurred during the conference — and I am now a part of that group.

The key points I learned from each of the workshops/keynotes are summarized in my Tweets, but can be summarized even further to the following three ideas:

• Be a culturally responsive teacher who engages readers with independence, choice, and voice. Ask the hard questions. (Kelly Gallagher)
• Be strategic in your feedback and hold students accountable to their own learning. (Roxanne Pope)
• Curriculum and learning targets should be set up so all learners have the same goal to achieve – but with different layers of complexity. (Shelley Moore)

Yet even beyond these “big ideas,” I learned about the reality of teaching within a community: as educators, we are not meant to undergo this journey alone. We are meant to share. We are meant to collaborate. We are meant to exchange resources. In my experience, the result of engaging in a teaching community is a greater sense of passion for this vocation and a feeling of being more grounded, because I have a whole community of educators standing behind me.

Why it matters.

Professional standard #7 for BC educators is, “Educators engage in professional learning.” Professional learning includes reflective practice, engagement with the teaching community (see Standard 8: “Educators contribute to the profession.”), and continuous revision of educators’ philosophy, practice, and development.

Conferences like the BCTELA day I participated in encourage educators to reflect on their practice by engaging with fresh ideas and resources and asking the questions that matter, ensuring they are taking steps to being better educators to their students. My engagement on social media encouraged me, as I realized I had a voice within the teaching community, even as a TC. The thoughts that I was engaging with for my professional learning were valuable to others in my PLN, and in turn, I was also able to engage with the things they were learning on their Provincial Pro-D Day.

Pro-D encouraged me to reflect on my achievement of Professional Standards 3 and 5: Am I continuously understanding and applying my knowledge of student growth and development? Am I implementing planning, instruction, and assessment practices that are effective, respectful, and inclusive? The three workshops I engaged with asked those exact questions.

Next steps.

Kelly Gallagher’s keynote session encouraged me to be more culturally responsive in my teaching. I am encouraged to bring more of the BLM movement and Indigenous issues into my ELA classroom. I received a plethora of source ideas and materials, as well as an idea on how to lay out my unit with my students. My hope is to spend our last unit together (on the relationship between humans and society) exploring these issues, being exposed to “seeds” that provoke deep thinking, and summatively asking my students to reflect: “How did the reading change your thinking?”

Roxanne Pope’s workshop on inclusive assessment practices showed me that feedback does not need to be equal — it needs to be equitable. Not all my students need the same amount of feedback. To be effective, efficient, and helpful in my assessment practice, I need to be more intentional and strategic in my feedback, and also hold my students accountable to their own learning. One way I would like to implement this is by setting aside time on Monday to offer my students feedback on their essay outlines. I hope my feedback will be focused and strategic, depending on the student in question. I would also like to have  a conversation with my students about how the feedback process might work best for them, and challenge them to take more ownership of progressing in their learning.

Shelley Moore’s workshop on inclusive curriculum design challenged me to keep an achievable goal in mind for ALL my students. What needs to be changed based on ability and learning differences is the complexity of how that same goal is achieved. In my practice, I would like to shift my focus and use the “Straight, Curvy, Mountainous” language to encourage my students to aim for complexity that they are both comfortable with and challenged by. In this workshop, I was also reminded about the importance of taking time to stop and breathe. I would like to work on taking moments to pause with my students, too.

Next week, I am participating my own self-initiated professional development. I signed up for a free trial to use a new project management platform for student-led projects like PBL. I am participating in a workshop that will outline how to navigate the Spinndle app. I am excited for further professional connections and ideas to bring into my classroom!

Professional Standard #3: Educators understand and apply knowledge of student growth and development.

Professional Standard #5: Educators implement effective planning, instruction, assessment and reporting practices to create respectful, inclusive environments for student learning and development.

Professional Standard #7: Educators engage in professional learning.

Professional Standard #8: Educators contribute to the profession.