Great PD for all

We had an absolutely fabulous PD session at school last week, focussing in on ensuring that everyone (30+ teachers and a couple of TAs as well) were comfortable making movies for themselves. Everyone, including myself, was put in the position of the learner, given the equipment required, a purpose to choose from and most importantly 12 support people who were students from our Y6 classes. You could almost feel the tension in the air as our enthusiastic AP set up the experience—no group work today, no excuses—everyone was to make a 100 second movie in the 3 hour slot and everyone had to push themselves into a situation where they would be stretching what they already knew. This meant that the technically able had to learn something new and the more reserved of us had to actually do it—for some this was a first! The kids were amazing—patience plus!
Lifelong learning was really to the fore—perseverence when things went wrong, risk-taking for everyone in front of each other, support that was just in time and heaps and heaps of laughs and fun! At the end of it all, it was smiles all round and lots of people feeling very very proud of themselves.
On reflection it was an interesting adult learning experience—not so much talking, lots of doing and creating—interesting to consider when one thinks about our students experiences in the classroom.