Professional Learning
I frequently engage in professional learning opportunities.
For example, in April 2017, I participated in a 3 day workshop entitled The Art of Hosting: Harvesting Conversations that Matter. This was a remarkable opportunity to think about engagement and participatory decision making. I highly recommend investigating The Art of Hosting.
In the winter of 2017, I enrolled in and completed a 6 week MOOC entitled Reconciliation through Indigenous Education hosted by Dr. Jan Hare at the University of British Columbia. This was an excellent learning experience. It will likely run again.
In August 2016, I attended a 1 day seminar by Sandra Herbst on Assessment and attended a 4 day institute conducted by Irene Fountas at Lesley University in Boston on Literacy Education designed for literacy leaders and school administrators.
In July 2016, I participated in the digital literacies stream of a 3 day Digital Pedagogies Institute.
From June - October 2016, I participated in almost weekly conversations with a Waldorf mentor teacher as I enrolled in the foundations course in Waldorf education through the Rudolph Steiner Centre in Toronto.
From January to April, 2016 I enrolled in an Additional Qualifications course from ETFO (Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario) in order to refresh and extend my understanding of current practices in Kindergarten.
In March 2016, I participated in a two-day workshop conducted by Learning for Sustainable Futures. This was one of the best professional learning experiences I have ever had. I feel it has transformed and improved my teaching.
In August 2014, I also attended a 3 day training session on the Transition Movement. This training was extremely useful to me and I would encourage anyone to find such a workshop in their area or create one.
In 2014-2015 I engaged in a year-long teacher-educator inquiry project with my colleague and friend Dr. Diane Collier, an assistant of literacy education at Brock University. Diane and I scheduled monthly conversations to discuss our practice as literacy teacher-educators and to investigate what relationship, if any, inquiry had or should have to literacy learning. Our investigations resulted in a Canadian Association for Teacher Education (CATE) presentation in June 2015 at Canadian Society for Studies in Education Conference entitled “It’s not in the Bag: Literacy and Inquiry”. Diane and I are continuing our conversations this year and planning on conducting an extensive literature review of research on the use of inquiry in literacy education courses.
My own teaching and learning is has been similarly fed by ongoing although less formal conversations with colleagues across the North America and in Australia. Recently these conversations have led to me being invited to be the External Examiner for a PhD Dissertation at the School of Education, Charles Sturt University, NSW, Australia. I see doing this kind of service as an important aspect of my own professional development as reading cutting edge research deepens the kinds of conversations I can have with my students.
In 2011, I was awarded a UPEI Student as Scholar Grant of $2,800 to support the development of my Early Literacies Methods Course. This money was used to buy a class set of small digital recorders so that pre-service teachers could audio tape a child reading and then conduct a short miscue analysis and design a lesson to support this child’s development as a reader of alphabetic print.
In 2010-2011 I conducted a literature review of research in teacher-education that uses discourse analysis. This paper was also presented as part of CATE at CSSE. This review helped me to see what kinds of research were being conducted in teacher-education what other kinds of research might be useful.