{"id":231,"date":"2017-11-05T23:03:33","date_gmt":"2017-11-06T07:03:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/ruthleong\/?p=231"},"modified":"2017-11-06T10:35:21","modified_gmt":"2017-11-06T18:35:21","slug":"unit-6-activity-3-employee-development-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/ruthleong\/2017\/11\/05\/unit-6-activity-3-employee-development-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"Unit 6 Activity 3: Employee Development Plan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Professional development is very important for teachers and educators. In fact, it is a requirement of profession and written into all collective agreements in the province. While professional development can cover many different areas, from sessions on how to organize garden clubs to talks on professional and personal ethics, there is a large trend towards educating teachers on how to incorporate and troubleshoot technology in the classroom.<\/p>\n

As an online teacher, I use technology in my work every day. I correspond with students and other teachers using programs such as Zoom or Skype and deliver my courses through Moodle. For BC online schools, many districts purchase stock course websites from BC Learning Network (BCLN). Essentially these stock courses have lesson videos and a general layout of the course. However, it is up to the individual teacher to personalize each course by rearranging units, creating assignments and tests, and changing assessment and evaluation weights and methods.\u00a0The problems that I come across most often are issues with my course website on Moodle. To combat this, BCLN has very good \u00a0course specific forums where teachers discuss mistakes or issues with the Moodle. I have found this to be exceptionally helpful, especially when I see other teachers post mistakes that can be found within the lesson videos or learning guides. This allows me to go into my own course and make the needed changes before it affects the learning of my students.<\/p>\n

My department head at school and I have been trying to encourage the other teachers at our school to use this online forum because it helps us eliminate many of the issues our students face when using the course website. At our \u00a0next in-school professional development day, we plan to use some of the time to introduce and help teachers get set up on the BCLN forum. Having planned other professional development activities with my department head, we are aware of a few things that are required to make a new initiative, especially on that involved employee development, successful.<\/p>\n

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  1. The new initiative needs to be meaningful and directly related to the teacher’s work. There needs to be “buy-in” for employee development plans to work. Teachers need to see the value of the learning otherwise they will not implement or use the strategies even after they have learned it.<\/li>\n
  2. There needs to be time made specifically for implementation of the employee development plan. I have participated in employee development initiatives that required work and training, but my superior expected me to add it to my regular work day without allotting me the time to learn and be trained. Eventually, I gave up on trying to sustain the new strategies I learned because I simply did not have the time in my busy work day.<\/li>\n
  3. Employees should be able to give feedback on the plan and to help make changes as necessary. Being able to give input and help continue to develop the plan helps employees take on more ownership and increases participation.<\/li>\n
  4. The skill level required for the new initiative needs to be manageable. If that tasks are too difficult or complicated, employees will eventually give up and the revert to old strategies.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In order to successfully deliver an employee development plan and initiative, my department head plans to incorporate the above four points as much as possible when introducing the BCLN forum. She will direct the teachers to their course specific forums and show them the ease and accessibility of the discussions. Her and I will be available to help teachers who are having troubles with the forums in order to decrease frustrations and complications as much as possible. We are trying to make this employee development plan as successful as possible by eliminating many of the implementation and sustainability issues that we have experienced in the past when introducing new strategies and methods.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Professional development is very important for teachers and educators. In fact, it is a requirement of profession and written into all collective agreements in the province. While professional development can cover many different areas, from sessions on how to organize garden clubs to talks on professional and personal ethics, there is a large trend towards […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":137,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ldrs500","category-unit-6","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/ruthleong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/ruthleong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/ruthleong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/ruthleong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/137"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/ruthleong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/ruthleong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":234,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/ruthleong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions\/234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/ruthleong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/ruthleong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/ruthleong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}