Educators take Action!
The International Professional Learning Network Association (IPLNA) is your advocate for professional growth and development. We understand that traditional forms of professional development are not always relevant to you, or the school you work for.
Therefore, we provide services to help make your informal professional learning more meaningful as it pertains to licensure renewal, contractual requirements, and an effective means to improve your pedagogy. After all, don’t your students deserve the best?
Some traditional professional development offerings including, conferences, workshops, and visiting experts have many characteristics that make them far less effective than intended.
- Too broad to help you improve
- Too costly for you to attend
- Too short for you to effectively process what you have learned
- Too sit and get, not enough collaborative and interactive methods used
As professional educators, we are always looking for ways to extend our learning and improve our craft. We want great professional development workshops, conferences or presentations to expand our knowledge. Our ultimate goal is of course to improve the educational learning environment for our students. Often, however, the workshops, conferences we attend, and consultants brought into the school are too broad in nature to have a meaningful impact on your classroom.
How often have you attended a professional development conference and ended up attending a few good presentations, but left feeling that you could have spent your time better? These conferences, while fantastic places to meet new people and network with others in the education field, often do not make much of a difference to your actual daily teaching practice. This is also true when a school, trying to save money, brings in a consultant to offer in-house professional development presentations. It isn’t that these conferences, workshops, and presenters are by any means to blame. Whenever you are setting up a conference, workshop, or presentation for such a large audience, the content has to be broad in nature so that the most benefit can be had by the participants. Here at IPLNA, we have the systems and frameworks that can assist you in making these forms of PD more meaningful to you and more effective.
Another problem with these types of traditional professional development offerings is the fact that they are often too short for you to process the information you just learned. This is because of the nature of these types of professional development. Often, you are in a room with hundreds of other teachers and the presenter is giving some great information. You might have time to ask some questions, but you are too busy taking notes so you can change the world for your students with this fantastic and innovative pedagogical practice. When the workshop is over you head to another and the cycle starts again. By the time you are back at your school, and looking at your notes, more questions arise. Possibly, when you are trying something out, it isn’t effective and you wonder why? You have no one to turn to and ask questions to because you are not with the presenter. This often leads to giving up and, therefore, the professional learning you just participated in, didn’t have the impact you had hoped for.
Here at IPLNA we have the tools you need to impact your own professional development so that it becomes more effective for you and your students.