Aha! Creating Moments that help

Aha! Moments

Today I presented a few systems to our staff as part of our teacher only days.  My aim when presenting material / training is always to attempt to give each and every teacher a moment where they can say "Aha! I can use that in the space I work in like this... "

As a reasonably experienced teacher I've sat through my fair share of training/sharing/PLD that while interesting has given me little to nothing I can go away and use in my setting straight away.  In my experience when I received PLD like this I struggled to implement ideas and retain what we did and/or learned about.  So I've always strived to give those that I'm working with something they can use the next day in their space.

I was super happy to hear that the session had be useful to our staff.  Not only was a great to receive compliments about the session but it was also great to get reminder that what I've shared was inspiring and that I was good at it - I think it's something we need to hear and take time to take on board more as teachers.  It's so easy to get stuck in making things better and not taking them time to celebrate the awesome things we do.

So what do I think I did to create those moments... 
- Kept it relatively simple 
- Slowed down and gave teachers time to play after introducing a concept, system, idea
- Used the knowledge and skills in the room giving staff a chance to share what they have done and what they're going to do with other staff rather than always being the one that's talking. 

I also kept the slide deck simple and demoed rather than talked to slides.  Here's the deck I used this time ... 

I ran two sessions today one with year 3-6 teachers and another with year 0-2 teachers.  Each session went over the basics of our new IT Help system, The Makerspace/STEAM space I'm running called the Exploration station and our digital citizenship resources called SHINE Online.  I ran through Hapara basics with year 3-6 and we started looking at what we're doing with iPads in year 0-2.   

I chose these topics as they were just a few of the things that were on the top of the to do list for me in the next few weeks and I thought they'd give teachers a really good grounding to start the year.  LIke with any PLD time is always a factor so there is plenty more I could have covered.   I am hoping to follow up with a few help videos over the next few weeks that will go back over the things we covered so staff have something to refer back to, so perhaps I'll add a few more things into those that will help with start of the year setup as well.  

For now though I'm just going to celebrate the fact that these session were successful I am pretty sure most participants if not all went away with something they can use in their space.