I am going to admit in this post that I struggle to find something that I learned with this course. The work this course advocates is work I do every single day, and it is work that really comes down to experience and refinement. When you talk about both coaching and professional development it is very difficult to put that work into a book and reading format that really teaches you how to actually do that work. The Jim Knight book is good, but it is actually a book I have read previously. While many of the assignments make you think deeper about what PL and Coaching really looks like, I truly believe many of them are unrealistic because whenever you talk about PL and coaching time is always a factor. Some of the hoops we had to jump through in this class just would not happen under a time crunch.
I think when I really drill down to my learning in this class it comes from adding to my experience bank. I truly believe the way to be successful with both coaching and PL is to try approaches, and then refine them. You get so many different people in this work that every relationship built as a coach is one you can pull a tactic from in the future. From a professional learning standpoint, it’s next to impossible to know how a presentation or workshop is going to play until you actually get out there and do it. Having to do it in this class just adds a workshop I can do to my bank because I now have time to refine it.
I think when I really drill down to my learning in this class it comes from adding to my experience bank. I truly believe the way to be successful with both coaching and PL is to try approaches, and then refine them. You get so many different people in this work that every relationship built as a coach is one you can pull a tactic from in the future. From a professional learning standpoint, it’s next to impossible to know how a presentation or workshop is going to play until you actually get out there and do it. Having to do it in this class just adds a workshop I can do to my bank because I now have time to refine it.