Reflection for Professional Development for Self-Renewal

Professional development is an aspect of education that we will always need to continue

to learn and grow. New discoveries are made every day on how we can better our teaching

strategies, make better connections with students, and keep our passion as educators and

influencers in the school system. Some think of professional development as trainings on

pedagogy and curriculum, but there are many trainings that we can take to better ourselves as

school personnel. This statement brings me to my first professional development training that I

attended called Stop the Bleed. This training was focused on school shootings and how we can

help one another and our students in crisis. We learned how to assess wounds and apply a

tourniquet to save as many wounded as we can. As scary and eye-opening as this training was, it

is a reality that we have to face and personally I would rather be prepared in a traumatic event

than be unprepared.

The next training that I attended was focused on identifying and preventing sexual abuse.

Unfortunately, this is a very important training for educators and school personnel to have

because of so many cases that have been exposed, or that are still ongoing, in our school system.

Our job as educators is to protect, teach, and love our children. For so many students school is

the only safe place they have to feel loved, be fed, or even get to wear clean clothes. It is

important to recognize signs of physical and sexual abuse to help our students get the justice and

childhood that they deserve. This training had some very eye-opening videos about cases of

sexual abuse in our state and how their educators helped them get justice or provided them with

hope that they so desperately needed. From this training I learned that sexual abuse and neglect

does not have a stereotype and it doesn’t matter if the child is from a good home or a bad home,

you never know what they can be going through.

The third training that I attended was a module that I completed for one of my college reading

classes on dyslexia awareness. I feel that this is a training that everyone needs to go through at

least once a year because the lack of knowledge that is taught on what dyslexia really is and how

it affects students. The module was very informative and shed new light for me on a reading

disability that I really didn’t have a lot of information on. As a special education major, this is

something that I needed to learn more about so that I can identify if a student has this disability

and get them the help that they need. This module also discussed some misconceptions about the

disability that I was none the wiser about. I really enjoyed taking this training and I definitely

feel that it was a professional development that has already contributed to me teaching career.

The fourth and fifth professional development sessions I had were taken in a college reading

class and one was on comprehension strategies and the other was the effective use of RTI for

students. The module on comprehension strategies went into depth on the five components of

comprehension and how we should be teaching these components in the classroom so that

students can apply them to become better readers. The response to intervention module was very

beneficial since I will be teaching special education and will be using this often to determine if

my students need special education services or if they just need some extra help or time in the

classroom. Both modules were very informational on their concepts and allowed me to apply the

knowledge with interactive activities. One of the activities for comprehension was sorting

students by their strengths and weakness into small groups for reading. This is a skill that I will

be using in my classroom and it was helpful to get the chance to do this before having a

classroom of my own. The interactive activity for the RTI module was creating a 90-minute

instruction plan for students. While this is a little bit like writing lesson plans, this was more
realistic, and I was given a timeframe to work within which is how my days will be in the

classroom.

The sixth professional development training I attended was for distance learning and the new

learning platform, schoology. This was a very informational training given by a teacher who was

also learning how to manage remote learning and schoology and she knew the best tips and tricks

to help us ease into this new form of learning as easily as possible. Although as student teachers

we had already been exposed to schoology, I had not had a proper training and the teachers did

not have the time to show us everything that we needed to know. The training also covered how

to manage Microsoft TEAMS and the teacher gave tips on how she had been managing her

classes during remote learning, which could be a challenging task. This training definitely

contributed to further my knowledge in my teaching career, as from one day to the next things

continue to change in this pandemic and way of life that we are still learning.

The seventh professional development was a training on stress and self-care throughout one of

the most difficult times in our lives. Teachers and students have been constantly thrown

curveballs since last March, and for those that do not handle change well, this could have been a

very overwhelming time. Throughout remote learning and quarantine there have been a lot of

uncertainty and fear. This training to help teachers remember that we must focus on ourselves

and our well-being before we can help others. Some of the points that were mentioned in this

training finding an outlet to relieve stress such as hobbies, exercise, online and virtual groups to

become apart of. The trainer discussed that we shouldn’t let ourselves drown in our thoughts and

“what ifs,” which can be easy to do especially when we are cooper up at home without human

contact. The trainer also gave great tips on how we can occupy ourselves at home incase of

quarantine and some blogs and groups we read and join to help us through this difficult time.
The eighth and ninth training that I attended was title 1 Thursday trainings on a book study about

distance learning. The information came from a book written by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey,

and John Hattie. The important aspects of this first training was emotionally engaging students

through virtual learning. The book discussed how difficult it can be to keep our students engaged

over a computer or tablet screen, but they mentioned some fun and engaged ways to keep

students motivated to learn. The second part of this training discussed that teachers should not be

relying solely on technological learning resources while remote learning. This came to a shock as

we are learning remotely through technology, so why shouldn’t we be using technological

resources? The authors explained that using tools that we are know are effective will be more

beneficial to our students than relying on technology for their entire learning experience.

The last professional development that I attended was not focused toward my teaching career but

toward my coaching career. I had been a coach for several years before Covid canceled most

sports this past year. We still have to recertify and take courses to keep us up to date on new

information for ourselves and for our athletes. I took the concussions course which is required to

take every year due to the amount and severity of concussions that athletes are getting each year.

The training discusses the major and minor symptoms of concussions that we should look for

and how we can take precautions to prevent athletes from getting concussions. Coaching softball

and cheerleading, these are both sports where concussions can be common in certain situations

so the course if essential for me to have each year to keep my athletes safe and help them to

continue participating in the sport they love in the safest way possible.