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This is the second part of the presentation prepared for 2016 PhysTEC conference (http://www.phystec.org/conferences/2016).

This part is related to an active form of teacher professional development named

“Professional Designing As One Of The Key Competencies Of a Modern Teacher”.

The first part is related to standardization of measuring learning outcomes in physics and available at www.teachology.xyz/FW.htm.

The full presentation is available at www.teachology.xyz/pr16.htm.

This part is based on my PhD dissertation (click here for an English translated part) and has become a chapter in a book by IGI Global about teacher professional development.

(1) Hello, I am Dr. Valentin Voroshilov,

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(2) I’ve been in the field of education for many years playing many different roles.

I was born and grew up in Russia. I had a pretty good career in Russia, but when I got a chance to move my family to the US, I took that chance.

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(3) After starting again from the bottom I have regained most of my previous career achievements. I am pretty proud of this, considering I had no formal education in English and no professional network to support my efforts.

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(4) The title of my presentation is ”Project-oriented form of teacher professional development for pre-service and in-service physics teachers“.

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(5) This conference is a big professional development event. When attending such an event, the result depends heavily on the attitudes of the attendees. Having a passive attitude means, that during an event an attendee does not search for a specific means for advancing his or her own practice; the activity is limited by seeing or hearing something new.

Having an active attitude means, that during an event an attendee searches for a specific means for advancing his or her own practice. Such a means can include a specific knowledge, or a technical instrument, or a potential collaborator, or else.

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(6) For example, I believe that “a standard” for measuring learning outcomes must satisfy the following five conditions:

(a)   Every aspect of the development and the use of the standard has to be open to public and be able to be examined by anyone.

(b)   The use of the standard must lead to gradable information on student’s skills and knowledge.

(c)   The use of the standard must lead to gradable information on student’s skills and knowledge, AND must not depend on any specific features of teaching or learning processes.

(d)   The use of the standard must lead to gradable information on student’s skills and knowledge, and must not depend on any specific features of teaching or learning processes, AND must allow to compare on a uniform basis the learning outcomes of any and all students using the standard.

(e)   Any institution adopting the standard should automatically become an active member of the community utilizing the standard and can propose possible alternations to the standard to accommodate changes in the understanding of what students should know and be able to do (if interested, follow this link: http://teachology.xyz/mocc.htm )

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(7) When a teacher attends a professional development event, he or she always has a choice to make.

The teacher can take a passive position (“I am just looking for something new and interesting”).

Or, the teacher can take an active position (“I have a problem and I need to find a means to solve it”).

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(8) The latter position significantly increases chances that after the event the teacher will be making some constructive changes in his or her teaching practice. And that is what we all want from a professional development event.

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(9) “When I started my career, I did not have a say in the menu of courses that my district taught. We logged into a training system and chose, based on what was being provided. The problem was that none of the provided sessions applied to what I needed, and when district requirements were that a certain number of hours be earned through in-district training, it meant that a large majority of teachers were taking courses just to earn the hours. That was more than 10 years ago, and sadly, in many school districts, this is still the case.”

This is a quote from a book by Rafranz Davis, “The Missing Voices in EdTech”, 2015 (CORWIN)

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(10) Various researchers have been looking for methods to ensure that after attending a professional development workshop a teacher will bring into his or her practice new knowledge presented at the workshop. One of the practices which proved to be efficient is based on the activity theory, and called “Professional Designing”.

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(11) Professional Designing helps to ignite and maintain a process of transformative development of an individual or an institutional educational practice. The theoretical foundation of this branch of the research can be found in publications of G.P. Shchedrovitsky (1964, 1966, 1971, 1977, 1981), and his colleagues, such as N.G. Alekseev (1992) and followers such as A.P. Zinchenko (2014).

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(12) By a definition: Professional Designing is an intellectual activity resulting in: (a) constructing an image of the ideal/perfect professional situation (whatever it might mean for a given person), and (b) planning activities aimed at the transformation of the actual professional situation making it closer to the ideal one; the material result of a professional designing is a project.

The link on the screen leads to a broader description of Professional Designing and its application to teacher professional development: http://www.teachology.xyz/pd.htm.

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(13) In order to transform his or her professional situation, teachers (a) must be willing to change their own practices, and (b) must be able to make the change. This means that professional skills, abilities, competencies of a teacher should include not only specific subject-related skills or teaching-related personal qualities, but also “meta-skills”, allowing to manage processes of idealization (i.e. drawing mental images), reflection, goal-setting, action scheduling, and so on, which are required for transforming a human practice. A combination of such skills forms the ability for designing the own teaching practice.

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(14) A professional designing is an activity that takes place primarily in the area of personal values and motives, goals and objectives, actions and procedures, problems and possible solutions. When conducting a professional designing, or shortly – when designing, one does not deal with real objects or subjects, but manipulate with the abstract concepts relevant to the one’s professional practice (here and below a person conducting a professional designing is called a designer, or a projecter – with the stress on the last syllable; other versions are “a projectEur” and “a projectOr”).

The first product of a professional designing is the formation of a project idea.

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(15) In simple terms, a project idea of a designer describes in his or her words “what is wrong with what I do”, and “how will I fix it”. The presence of a project idea does not automatically ensure its future realization, but it indicates the direction of the future actions of the designer; the project idea becomes the basis for the development of a detailed professional project, which is a textual representation of a current professional situation, certain professional problems, and proposed steps for solving those problems, including criteria and procedures for assessing the progress.

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(16) The most important product of a professional designing is a personal professional project, the existence of which significantly increases chance for a teacher implementing in the future practice knowledge presented during a workshop.

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(17) A professional designing – as a human activity – is essentially situational; its ultimate goal is to find mechanisms for self-transforming a concrete current professional situation of a projecter.

A projecter never works alone; there is always a set of active or potential collaborators (or competitors).

An effective form for coordinating professional goals and actions, based on the implementation of project-aimed activities, is the so-called  “activity-organizing workshop”. AOW participants usually represent coworkers from an institution or an institutional entity, or represent the same district. (sometimes at a retreat)

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(18) Communicating processes ignited during AOW and aimed at unveiling images, views, and opinions of participants about professional activities of themselves and others are complicated and sometimes emotional. That demands the involvement of an experienced moderator (a.c.a. a “methodolog”, a.c.a. a “methodologist”; the former term is more broadly used in the context of AOW). Guided by a methodolog, AOW participants become actively engaged into an individual professional designing. As the result of this work, the participants inevitably advance their ability to conduct a professional designing.

The effectiveness of AOW strongly correlates with the experience of a methodolog moderating the event.

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(19) It is very important for the success of the whole event that participants would be willing to openly discuss their teaching experience (including such personal and usually internal matters as their values, moral limits, beliefs, life expectations, professional aptitudes, goals and actions). This conversation usually leads to an eventual realization of the existence of some gap/disconnect/incoherence between the results and the structure of actual teaching practice and the declared teaching goals and methods. When the existence of this gap is clearly presented to a participant, the so-called “problematic situation” has been reached.

Links: pdf http://teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

(20) All precedents of AOW demonstrate that when teachers are immersed into a professional designing it positively affects their teaching practice in general and an ability to self-improve their teaching practice in particular. The conclusions on the effectiveness of the project-oriented methods of organizing teacher professional growth were made ​​on the basis of individual interviews, surveys, and reflective feedback from teachers, and observations of teachers’ activities during events and while teaching students before and after events.

Thank  you!

Dr. Valentin Voroshilov   www.TeachOlogy.xyz

P.S. All the pictures above a courtesy of the Internet and/or MS Office tools.

The link to a video: https://youtu.be/9ZEWcp41ASo

The link a pdf: www.teachology.xyz/PrD.pdf

The link to the full article: http://www.teachology.xyz/pd.htm

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