Thursday, March 8, 2007

Session 9: Professional Development

Session 9: Professional Development

This week pod cast is about the professional development. It includes many elements of why, reason for, purpose, the need, effective, following-up, and more about training. Below is my memory of my first teaching job which involved with training.
“Well, just another same ‘bull…’ again.”, “I can’t do it on that day.”, and “Why do we have to do this every time?” Those were phrases that I heard after the first meeting, a week before the semester began. It was about mandatory for all of us, the automotive instructors, to meet with the library personnel to arrange the time to bring the students in our class to the Learning Center for basic “e-mail and computer” training. The reason was students would be issued an e-mail account to send in their Honda assignments modules. In addition, they must know how to navigate the websites to search for the automotive information.
Four years ago, I was at the first training session with my students, and the library staffs did a great training job as they supposed to. After students came back from the Learning Center, I had noticed that most of them knew the usage of e-mail for their Honda learning modules effectively. But their skill on exploring the Internet to obtain the manufacture’s information on the vehicle they work on was not adequate. They kept using the hard copies of technical manuals instead of the Internet. Once in awhile, they needed new information, and they forgot how to find it by using the computer.
I finally figured out why they did not use the Internet. The reason was the work sheet assignments have not been up-dated for awhile. Most of the specifications they need to know were on older vehicle models. This information was not in the electronic manuals. I brought this matter up at the faculty meeting. The result was all instructors, including myself, must up date our lessons plans and performing task sheets with more new vehicles for students to use both the electronic and hard copy manuals. When this happened, I was not popular among the instructors (Besides, I was a new-hired instructor too.)
Four years later, now, no one remembers this, and no one complains about updating the lesson plans every year. We all have the assignments with the newest vehicles and technologies up to date. It now becomes natural for all the students to run to the computer to find the specifications they need three or more times during their workshop hours.

Week of March 5, 2007 to March 11, 2007
Activities and Log

Monday to Thursday

Listen to podcast and think about this topic.
Fine tune my blog and website.
Learning the Dreamweaver and trying to create my Homepage.
Write this posting and posted it.
Read and commented other scholars postings
Begin to listen to next week podcast and work on the next week posting.
All my three projects completed and submitted last week.

6 comments:

Rosa said...

Hi De,

What a way to put your mark as the new teacher ;-)

Professional Develpment is not always popular but it has to be done to keep our skills updated. But your story reflects that not only our skills have to be updated, paperwork has to follow the trail and be up to date as well.

James said...

Hi,

Good example of how professional development helped the students and didn't help the students in the long run. In order for a training session to be effective, it must reflect on material that is going to be used by either the students or the instructor. If they are using outdated materials and expect you to accept this for training purposes, then they should update their training modules. Great point and that is good that your brought this up at a meeting. I am sure that the other instructors are thankful for your comments back then.

James

Michele said...

Great point. Professional development is a necessity in order to continue to be successful in your field.

dflores1972 said...

You made a great point on how professional developmetn is necessary for the field.

RFLORES said...

Hello De,

Sometimes we have to play the "villain" part in the movie. This is just the way things are. I for one, do not mind doing that, as long as my doing so serves a positive purpose; as it was illustrated in your Honda automotive update example.
Besides, the purpose of professional development is for instructors such as ourselves, to remain abreast on the latest developments in technology. It would be irresponsible for us to teach outdated technology to our students. Personally speaking, if that is what it takes to trigger professional development, well then...so be it.

Anonymous said...

Congratulations on being done! Your blog posts were very informative. Your examples of the professional developments you have had were interesting.