Cooked On Education

Professional Development Meme

Jun 6th, 2008 by Mark Spahr

Ahhhh, summer. School’s out and its time for the teacher to relax a bit, learn something new, and recharge the creative batteries. Except in my case school isn’t entirely out.

Summer is an interesting time at my school. Because my students are all incarcerated, we don’t shut down for the warm months. We can’t exactly send the kids home for the summer, saying “see you when you come back in the fall. Stay out of trouble!” So what we do is teach half days, with classes in the morning, and activities for the kids in the afternoon. It doesn’t leave as much time for professional development that public school teachers have, but it does leave me with some opportunities.

Last night, I got tagged to partcipate in a professional development meme (I confess I had to look the word up!) by Michael Richards. The idea is to set some personal professional development goals for the summer and “tag” some other educators to participate as well. After being tagged himself, here is what Richards passed on in his blog:

Here are the directions:

Summer can be a great time for professional development. It is an opportunity to learn more about a topic, read a particular work or the works of a particular author, beef up an existing unit of instruction,
advance one’s technical skills, work on that advanced degree orcertification, pick up a new hobby, and finish many of the other items on our ever-growing To Do Lists. Let’s make Summer 2008 a time when we actually get to accomplish a few of those things and enjoy the thrill of marking them off our lists.

Here are the rules:

Pick 3 professional development goals and commit to achieving them this summer.

For the purposes of this activity the end of summer will be Labor Day (09/01/08).

Post the above directions along with your 3 goals on your blog.

Title your post Professional Development Meme and link back/trackback to http://clifmims.com/blog/archives/353.

Use the following tag/ keyword/ category on your post: pdmeme.

Tag 8 others to participate in the meme.

Achieve your goals and “develop professionally.”

Commit to sharing your results on your blog during early or mid-September.

Here are my goals:

Research classroom blogging and find a way to implement blogs for students in the “walled garden” that is my class.
Read at least three books for professional development. I know one will be Getting Things Done. I’m open to suggestions for the other two.
Attend the MLTI Summer Institute and report on my take-aways from the conference.

I Tag…