Professional Development Learning

This past week I got the opportunity to participate in a professional development class. Our school participates is the sim development which consists of different parts, such as: comparison tables, unit organizers, course organizers, and frame. The topics we discuss were the unit organizer and the comparison table. The unit organizer was a very helpful guide for the students and I. This guide gives a schedule of what would be going on that day and the days to come, explanation to what will be learned from the unit, and how the lessons will be divided throughout the unit. The next topic we went over was the comparison table. This will be a great thing to use in the classroom to get the student more involved. The comparison table has 9 steps to which you follow. You start the table by coming up with two concepts, then step two is deciding an overall concept. Once the concepts and overall concept is decided you can now list some characteristics of each concept. Once the characteristics are listed, then place the like characteristics together and come up with like categories, then place the unlike characteristics together and come up with unlike categories. Once the categories have been made you now must make up a summary of the lesson and put and extension to the lesson. An example of the comparison table would be comparing alcohol and tobacco. Alcohol would be a concept, tobacco would be a concept, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle would be the overall concept. After a lesson this would be a great activity for the students to complete to show what they had learned from the lesson. In my opinion, by getting the students up and moving around will help get them more focused on what the lesson is about rather than making them sit there for the full ninety minutes.