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Traditional HR Carrots and New Staff Learning Models

At the end of the last week, I received an email from a teacher asking about how our Flipped Professional Development model will work inside the current Human Resources guidelines for what are called in our district professional growth hours. After so many professional growth hours - time outside the contracted day you are in a training session - you either cash out a set amount of money or take a credit on the pay scale (which I'm certain will look different by July 1 of 2013). This is certainly a fair question and I was honest with the teacher - I had no idea, but I'd get back to her.

How do HR carrots apply to non-tradition modes of learning? Unless that teacher asks for time to meet outside of the school day to apply what she learned in the screencasts there's no set amount of time I could sign off on. I can't give anyone credit for watching the videos, because I have no clue who watched it.

After reflecting on it for a couple of days, I feel the two don't match up. If you try to match them up, you need a sledge hammer to try and make them fit.

What might be a better way to measure staff learning where they have access to the information 24-7 and you might choose to meet with a specialist during the school day to work on implementation? What would be a good assessment of professional development?

Perhaps for clock hours you take a quick multiple choice test, like the ones you can embed into YouT...just kidding. I think a basic reflection on learning - listing key bullet points of what was covered and a handful of ways they may use what they learned during the school year is a start. Provide a rubric for the reflection, and give examples of both weak and strong responses. There could be some sort of credit assigned to anyone who does that step in the learning. The next, more meaningful step can include a portfolio of how you applied what you learned into your classroom. This could include artifacts of what you created and examples of student work that shows what you did, what worked/didn't work and how you'll use it in the future. I would think the credit for doing something like this would be worth 4-5 times as much the learning portion.

These are ideas I'm kicking around in my head. Now I need to come up with a plan to take to HR. What do you think? How do we evaluate professional learning in the world of YouTube tutorials and Personal Learning Networks? Some might say, you do it as a part of your professionalism. That's a fair point too, but I'm going to make an effort to try and find something that fits better with the model.

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