Professional Development: Specialist Certificate in Professional Development
Sunday, October 03, 2021Alhamdulillah, I am honoured to be awarded the scholarship by the Ministry of Education to participate in a 6-week online course by SEAMEO RELC. This course will help upgrade my abilities as a teacher coach. It covers aspects such as the skills to develop as a trainer, using competency framework as PD, and transitioning the role from teacher to teacher leader.
The course takes on Project-Based Learning as by the end of the course we are expected to simulate an online professional development panel discussion. To prepare us for this, we will engage in academic reading, blog writing, and presentations.
Prior to the beginning of the course, our trainer reaches out to us via email. We were asked to complete a pre-class blog post telling our classmates about ourselves. I found this activity served as mental preparation because it is important to know who you will be interacting and cooperating with. These people our should I say now, are my friends who as nervous and excited as I am. Nonetheless, they are highly qualified in their field. It is a diverse group with people from primary, secondary, tertiary and even education offices like me.
Let's talk about what I learned. For the first class, we were assigned 6 reading materials! Haha, here we focus on the adult learning principle, Kolb's and Salmon 5-stage model. The online class was productive and we had so much fun. I didn't even realise the time! During the 3-hour class, we came to understand the characteristics of an effective trainer and our trainer modelled it for us to experience it first hand! I believe in my online training, I never encounter such competency. I aspire to emulate my trainer.
Well, after the class the workload were not easy, haha rather challenging. We need to respond to questions and I'm sharing my responses here, so that I can recall what I wrote when the LMS is not accessible to me anymore.
