Professional Learning Plan
Professional Learning is ongoing Lyn Hay
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ave you developed your professional learning plan for 2014 yet? With the introduction of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (AITSL, 2013), teachers and teacher librarians are now responsible for charting a course to meet their own professional learning goals. These standards provide you with a point of departure for reflecting on what you achieved in the past year, then identifying those areas you wish to develop further. The expectation is that professional learning is now a far more individualised and formalized pursuit as teachers identify, engage and document what they have learned against the standards. Education systems, professional associations and professional learning providers are now faced with the challenge of providing teachers and teacher librarians with more personalised and customised offerings to assist them in meeting their own professional learning goals for the year. This is no mean feat, given the specific and diverse needs of tens of thousands of teachers in Australia. In response to this challenge, the team at Syba decided to extend its Seminars Program to develop a suite of new professional learning programs across a wider range of formats for 2014 educators in Australian schools. A new division of Syba has been established to develop and manage these programs, and it has been branded Syba Academy, to better reflect the quality and diversity of our educational services.
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n 2013, the Academy gained NSWIT/AITSL endorsement as a provider of professional development. A complete list of our course offerings to date can be found at http://www.sybaacademy.com.au/learning/ courses. All of our 2014 seminars, workshops and courses are accredited to ensure participants receive endorsed credit for relevant professional learning hours, complete with a Syba Academy certificate of completion, and access to a digital badging facility for those who wish to record the progress of their professional learning journey on an e-portfolio, professional website, personal blog, or social network sites such as Google+ or LinkedIn. Designing effective professional learning experiences for individual teachers, individual schools, regional teacher and TL networks, and school districts is our core business. We are also partnering with state associations, education systems and educational agencies to host co-sponsored events. The focus of our program is to provide customised learning experiences based on the specific needs of those individuals, groups or organisations we work with. In other words, personalisation and customisation are our key drivers in the provision of professional learning. That is our challenge. Our design of professional learning (PL) programs has been informed by the research literature, the pool of evaluation data from past Syba PL seminars and events, and the results of Syba’s 2013 professional learning survey. In particular, findings from Desimone’s (2011) analysis of the empirical research on characteristics of teacher professional development associated with changes in teacher knowledge