The Best Professional Development for Social Studies Teachers

I just finished having one of those infamous PD days. I'm sure you know the kind of PD I am talking about. A day put on by the school district who have the best intentions of providing their teachers with the professional development they think teachers need. A day were there was a ridiculous keynote speaker who, instead of inspiring us, made us start looking for the exits after 20 minutes. A day where there was very little choice of interesting sessions to go to. So while I was daydreaming in one of my "interesting" sessions, I started to make a list of the best PD sessions a Social Guy could have. This is what I have so far.

• Sharing Sessions: Some of the best advice I have ever been given was from an Assessment for Learning Consultant named Ruth Sutton. She said the best PD for teachers is to have the opportunity to share/speak with other teachers. How many ideas have you come up with while speaking to colleagues? You work with excellent teachers feed off each other's ideas.
• Travel: Whenever I get the opportunity to go to a conference of some sort, I always try to choose a location that has some Social Studies benefit. Going to historic sites, stock exchanges, museums,etc can reinvigorate your outlook on what you teach. Some of the best places in my travels for this have been Washington DC, Chicago, Quebec City and France. Organizing a student trip can also benefit you as much as the kids. This could be a topic for a later post.
• School Visits: How do other Social Studies Departments deal with issues that your department is having? Go and find out. Seeing other schools in action can give you ideas as well as validation. Quite often I find it reassuring when I see the same thing going on in another building
• PD Committees: Get involved in your school's PD Committee. If you don't like what's going on then get active and try to enact positive change. Be a leader. What I have found is that by doing this, new and wonderful PD opportunities occur that the school will pay for, you begin to have professional conversations with your colleagues and you become a bit of an expert on certain topics.
• Volunteer at a high level: Get involved at the provincial level. I am currently on a resource review team for the government. Not only do I get of input on the text that I will get to use but I get paid for being in serviced on curricular changes. What's better than free PD...paid PD. Not only that, I now have another network of Social teachers to bounce ideas off of.

The Idea of having a PD is awesome. I admire those who try to put them on and I understand that the experiences I have just listed are nearly impossible to have during a one day workshop. So I have learned to make the best of these District PD Days and I have learned to seek out different opportunities that will benefit my professional development.