What really works?

In my opinion, most professional learning development is lousy. Though professional learning for teachers is critical to their development, most teachers aren’t given the kind of professional development that would actually help them. Most teaches only experience traditional, workshop-based professional development, even though research shows it’s ineffective. The reason it’s ineffective is that it doesn’t support teachers during the stage of learning with the steepest learning curve: implementation. For example, in the same way that riding a bike is more difficult then learning about riding a bike, employing a teaching strategy in the classroom is more difficult than learning the strategy itself.

As a financial aid counselor, my organization is not open to too many alternative approaches. There are so many federal regulations and guidelines that must be followed to adhere to the Department of Education. Everyone knows that the feds are not people that you want to mess with. So, with most of our professional development consist of learning tons and tons of regulations. Although, learning these regulations are important, how to convey all of this information to the student in a way in which the student understands is placed totally on the counselor.

My goal is to utilize the five principles of professional development in each counseling session. The idea is to specialize in counseling the student in each area of the college experience including admissions and financial aid.