Personalizing Professional Development

Brad Rathgeber, Executive Director

Last month, I wrote about One Schoolhouse’s pedagogical innovation of personalized student courses. This month, I'm expanding that conversation to discuss personalizing professional development both for faculty members who teach our One Schoolhouse courses and for courses that we run for faculty and staff at independent schools. At One Schoolhouse, we understand that all students learn differently -- and this includes adult learners.

For our own faculty, we are personalizing their future development. To do this, we are eschewing the idea of a faculty theme and instead working with faculty members on their individual goals and school-wide objectives. Corinne Dedini wrote about this recently here. Each faculty member will have unique goals and unique learning plans (including specialized training) to further their development towards school faculty competencies. This last part is key... many independent schools incorporate faculty goal setting and planning into their professional development processes. Yet, many do not ensure that those goals and plans align directly to school wide goals for teaching and learning. Ours do.

By the end of this year, all of our professional development courses will be personalized. In those courses and programs, participants will have choice in how they check their understanding of topics covered and apply their knowledge to real-world situations in variety of ways. And, these courses also have gamification elements, including badging. Early results of this work are promising: active engagement in courses with badging is up almost 50% in professional development courses.  
​
We encourage faculty to experience the difference in taking a personalized professional development course themselves in a few courses that start soon: Building Leadership in Boys Schools, Budget Meets Mission (Essentials of Business Operations for Non-Business Officers), and Long-Range Financial Planning.

---