Professional Development- Learning from Colleagues

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to attend a professional development conference that was a wonderful opportunity to learn from my colleagues.  The conference was a summit for high school biology teachers from all around our county to collaborate, discuss shared successes and challenges, and share ideas for great ways to engage our students in our biology content.  One challenge we all face is the Pennsylvania Keystone Exam, which all of our biology students must take at the end of our course and then re-take if they fail to perform at a proficient level.  Much of our discussion centered on how we can help our students to be successful on this exam, but we also all share a deep desire to make the biology content meaningful for our students beyond the exam (and perhaps despite of it!).

Two adjectives I might use to describe my time at the summit are inspiring and invigorating.  I loved getting to hear from other teachers about how they deal with challenges, how they teach various concepts, how they pace themselves through the curriculum, how they differentiate lessons, how they remediate struggling students, and much more!  I was amazed at how dedicated, creative, and talented my fellow biology teachers are and was so encouraged at everyone's willingness to talk and share throughout the various sessions of the day.  I guess it makes sense, since we all have pretty much the same job, but we all just seemed to "click."  I was honored to be a part of the day.

The day was organized as an "Edcamp."  We began the day by individually jotting down post-it notes of topics we were interested in discussing more with our colleagues.  The post-its were categorized by the facilitators and overarching topics were developed for small group discussion sessions.  We then had a choice between three different discussion groups for each of our four sessions throughout the day.  Each group would meet in a different area of the large room, discussing our topic (or anything else that came up related to the topic) for about 45 minutes.  We took notes and shared documents on a shared Google doc.  Our only break was a luxurious one hour!! lunch at the cafe.  The summit took place at our county's technical school, and our delicious lunch was prepared and served by the culinary arts students at the school, which was amazing.

For me, the major benefit of the day, apart from being inspired by my colleagues, was that I was exposed to many different ideas for teaching various topics.  I heard some great ideas about teaching vocabulary, engaging students in summarizing their learning, and relating difficult biology concepts to topics students will be able to identify with.  I hope to be able to implement many of these ideas throughout the course of this school year and in future school years.