Professional Development Activities

Professional Development Groups

Staff are encouraged to make use of opportunities to develop their teaching skills through participation in the following groups.

PEEL

The Project for Enhancing Effective Learning (PEEL) was founded in 1985 by a group of teachers and academics who shared concerns about the prevalence of passive, unreflective, dependent student learning, even in apparently successful lessons. They set out to research classroom approaches that would stimulate and support student learning that was more informed, purposeful, intellectually active and independent. The project was unfunded and not a result of any system or institution-level initiative. PEEL teachers agree to meet on a regular basis, in their own time, to share and analyse experiences, ideas and new practices.

The original project was intended to run for two years at one (secondary) school, however the process of collaborative action-research, the developments of so many new ideas for practice and the changes in classroom environment all proved very rewarding for the teachers. Consequently, at the end of the initial two years, the teachers refused to let the project end and a year later it began to spread to other schools in Australia and then in other countries. This spread was driven by teachers in those schools who had similar concerns about learning, as well as the lack of opportunities in a normal school day for collaborative reflection, and who wished to set up PEEL groups of their own. While the initial spread was in secondary schools, there is now a growing network of teachers in primary/elementary schools.

Mount Gambier High School has used the PEEL approach as part of its professional development program since 2001. Led by teacher Chris Wilson, who has had fourteen years experience with PEEL in Victoria and South Australia and has presented at six local and international conferences based on those experiences, the MGHS PEEL program offers teachers the opportunity to meet for relaxed discussion about their practice. While the themes of the discussions vary greatly, the central focus is always on the pursuit of effective learning in the classroom.

In 2008 three PEEL groups meet regularly, with a focus of identifying what makes an 'effective teacher'. The three groups - a teacher group, a graduate group, and (for the first time) a student group - have each developed their own perspectives on the issue, and will hold joint meetings in the second half of the year to discuss similarities and differences in those perspectives.

Follow these links to see the summarised versions of the three groups' discussions:

• the teacher perspective (22Kb Word Doc)
• the graduate perspective (52Kb Word Doc)
• the student perspective (28Kb Word Doc)

Teachers Sharing Practice

Teachers Sharing Practice is an informal, teacher-initiated group started in 2008 from the idea that teachers have a lot to learn from each other's experience. The days of observing other teachers at work in their classrooms need not stop when a student teacher graduates with a qualification.

Our commencement activity was to pair up with one other teacher and observe each other teach. Teachers were asked to identify an area they would like the observer to focus on (see observation template). An informal debrief would occur after the lesson.

Future activities will be by group consensus.