Week Four - Andy

What PD happens in your workplace? What strategies does your organisation have in place to encourage development, change and innovation?

Professional development is a tool that can help people to optimize his/her personal development and job growth. It includes learning opportunities, such as college degrees and coursework, or attending conferences or training sessions. And at the same time the professional development system can assist the organization to assess the employees about their daily work, in this way, to adjust the development strategy.

To be honest, I have less idea about the professional development about my original university. I know one part of the professional development is that in the end of each term, the faculty will ask the students to finish a questionnaire, just like an evaluation system, all the questions are about the teaching and teacher, such as “Do you like the course? Why?”, “Does the teacher teach in a clearly way?” The faculty leader will take the questionnaire result to be one part of assessment. Besides these, the academic research work makes most of teachers ” crazy” in my organization. Because the teacher in mainland China has less money on research than foreign countries. School leaders force the teacher to acquire some of academic research achievement, but only few teachers can do these in mainland China.

Here I want to use ACOT model to explain the second question. In my organization, the school depends on the quality of the teachers. Teachers should be encouraged to develop, learn new knowledge, and grasp new ICT skill.

1. Entry

Teachers struggle to learn the basics of using technology. It is necessary for teachers to improve themselves, the skill must be grasped, because the quality of the teachers will directly influence the organization.

2. Adoption

Teachers move from the initial struggles to successful use of technology on a basic level. When they feel that the ICT can help them teaching more easily, they gradually accept the new change. This is the method my organization does.

3. Adaptation

Going through the first two step, educators move from basic use of technology to discovery of its potential for increased productivity. The organization begins to take a change showly.

4. Appropriation

Having achieved mastery over the technology, teachers use it "effortlessly" as a tool to accomplish a variety of instructional and management goals. The organization become a learning organization.

5. Invention

Educators are prepared to develop entirely new learning environments that utilize technology as a flexible teaching and learning tool. They begin to "think with technology," designing new ways to solve learning problems that their students may have faced in the past. When finish this stage, I think ICT can be implemented, these is the goal most of university want in mainland China.

P.S. Because of limited experience, some idea maybe wrong or extreme, please figure out, thank you.

Ref:
Adapted from "A Report on 10 Years of ACOT Research"（1996）


An useful article about ACOT model
http://classroomtips.wikispaces.com/file/view/acot+1page.pdf