bradshreffWhen I started out on this endeavor, I had the best of intentions. I was full of energy and excitement. Even when the first online session wasn’t as attended as I would have liked, I figured, “Hey, it happens. They’ll get it next time.”
And they did, as I explained in this blog post. After the first face-to-face that was enhanced, they really started to see the benefit.
But, as you can tell from the September date on that post, there has been little update since.
It really isn’t my fault though. One of the things I failed to consider in my plan of taking over the school from the grassroots level was that other people may not be on-board with my plan. Specifically, other people working at the district level. Our Superintendent wants everyone to work on reading across the content areas. Which is great, and important, and something that we should have been doing all along.
As part of that program, we have a team of teacher leaders who attended training, and now they are supposed to share back out with their departments about close reading strategies. So, of course, they’re doing this face-to-face.
The fault isn’t on these teacher-leaders so much. While they understand the benefit of flipped PD as participants, they don’t have the time to dedicate to building online lessons in addition to their own classes. I don’t have the expertise in each of their content areas to make it a reality in practice for myself.
To top all that off, between Hurricane Irma losing us days and now this district initiative, my previously scheduled 9 flipped PD enhanced face-to-face sessions are reduced down to 6 (if I’m lucky). For now, it’s time to move on and make those 6 sessions really great.