Competency Based Flipped Professional Development

Video Transcription

Hello there and welcome. We have spent some time talking about flipping professional development. So in this lesson, I will walk you through the process of actually designing one, using a competency based approach. We will do this using Sophia.org. Let's begin.

Before I actually build a flipped lesson, I need to design it. The first step will be to choose the areas in which to align it with. I've decided to start with the district's initiative to move toward a standards based reporting system.

Next, I will identify a couple of competency based objectives I want the learners to achieve. The first one is that teachers will use analytic rubrics to score students' writing. And teachers will design assessments, in order to create the opportunity for students to demonstrate proficiency.

Now it's time to align our competency based objectives to professional teaching standards. And they're recorded here. In TASC standards 6, Danielson standard 1c, Marzano DQ1.1. And for the second objective, Danielson 1f, Danielson 3d, and ISTE number 2.

Again, they are both aligned to the district initiative. And the content makes for a natural fit to Marzano's high yield instructional strategies as well.

Just like I would when preparing a lesson for our fourth grade classroom, I need to decide what I want to include. And when designing professional development plans for adult learners, there are a lot of choices. For example, we can include videos about standards based grading and assessments, articles about the topic, a quiz, links to sites that will help teachers create rubrics, support materials, and of course, a self reflection.

I will now show you a completed lesson and how to get there. When you go to Sophia.org, you'll be asked to login. If you already have an account, sign in. Otherwise, you can create one, or sign in using Facebook or Google+.

At the top of the page, you will find quick links, one of which is Tutorials. You will use this tab to search for a lesson, or in this case, to build one. I would click, Create a tutorial.

After following a few prompts, you will arrive at a page that looks like this. This is the page that I will use to construct my lesson. As you can see, under the Insert drop arrow, I am able to add things like links videos, images, text, and more.

Let's take a look at my completed lesson, to find out what I included. I inserted the items in an order that makes sense to me. But in this case, the learner can feel free to jump around and go back to them any time and as often as they would like.

First, I included a TED talk by Heidi Hayes Jacobs, to get the learner thinking about assessments. Next, I included a pair of articles that talk about the positives of standards based grading and some challenges as well. There is a link to a Google forum, where students can take a survey about there own assessment practices. This gives them a way to activate prior knowledge and self reflect on their practices. Finally, there's a link to IRubric, a place students can go to create their own rubrics.

If we scroll back to the top, you'll see that there's a place to add a quiz, based on the material that was covered in this video. I could also simply put a link to an existing quiz on the topic as well.

Learners could find a lesson like this by searching for it on their own or having it assigned to them by an instructor. The beauty of flipped learning is that it can be accessed anytime from any place and can be revisited as many times as you'd like. I hope you're able to see how easy it is to build one. Keep in mind that something like this typically leads directly into a larger in person professional development session, making it more of an interactive learning experience, where participants have a great deal of background knowledge and context.

And now for today's food for thought. I challenge you to try to build your own flipped lesson using Sophia or another platform. Good luck.

And dive a little deeper and learn how to apply this information, be sure to check out the additional resources section associated with this video. This is where you'll find links targeted toward helping you discover more ways to apply this course material. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.