Here’s what you’ve been missing on PSEA’s Center for Professional Learning

If you haven’t already made use of PSEA’s exceptional Center for Professional Learning portal, there’s no better time than right now. Our Education Services department has responded quickly and aggressively to the COVID-19 emergency to provide our members with an array of online wellness training along with our usual offering of webinars and book discussions. 

We asked our director of Education Services, Carla Claycomb, to walk us through what’s currently being offered, and give us a preview of what’s to come.
 

Q: What training and online learning options specific to the COVID-19 pandemic are being offered on PSEA’s Center for Professional Learning? 

A: At this point we are doing two things and developing a third. The first thing that we’ve instituted since school building closures is what we’re calling our wellness series. And we have so far three things in our wellness series. One, which happened a couple of weeks ago, was Finding Calm in the Chaos. The other one is called Breathing Outside the Box. We also have something coming up in May on educator wellness.

Then the second thing that we put together is a series – we’re calling it a forum – where we’re inviting PSEA members to come together around a specific issue of practice related to school building closures. 

Q: Can you explain how those work?

A: For example, we have some on special education issues like how to do related services for students with disabilities or how to work with students with low-incidence disabilities in a distance learning context. Then we also have some on how to work in a low-tech or no-tech environment and meet the learning needs of kids or how to work in a specific learning management system. 

And the intention of this series is to pull PSEA members together around these specific issues of practice. And then we have a staff person who may provide 10 to 30 minutes up front of framing information for the conversation.

Then we put our members into Zoom discussion groups and have them share both interesting practices that have been helpful to them, lessons they’ve learned, essentially positive things they can share with their colleagues about this particular issue of practice. 

And then also to bring to the conversation a couple of really sort of vexing issues of practice that they haven’t been able to solve to help, to have their colleagues troubleshoot with them. So, we’re calling them forums because they’re really troubleshooting problem-solving forums where we’re convening members together to help each other.
 
 
Q: Are Act 48 and Chapter 14 requirements still the same during this pandemic?

A: For Chapter 14, yes. Our instructional aides still must have 20 hours of professional learning per year. 

For Act 48, part of what was included in Act 13 was a one-year delay, or adding one year to everybody’s Act 48 calendar. So typically you would have five years to do 180 hours or six college credits for your Act 48. This extends that window by a year for everybody.
 
 
Q: Has there been kind of an increase in interest in the current CPL offerings since this all began?

A: Yeah, massive interest. We were really overwhelmed by the interest in Keeping Calm in the Chaos, and I will be replaying that two more times in April and May just to try to meet the member need. 

It’s just been tremendous. We had over 1,000 people register and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds show up, or high hundreds show up for the two sessions. And similar for Breathing Outside the Box.

Q: What kind of responses have you been getting from members who have attended these?

A: I would say on everything it’s been pretty out-of-the park positive. One of the most powerful things that we heard from the first wellness forum, Keeping Calm in the Chaos, is that our members didn’t feel alone anymore. That they were able to honestly find a moment of calm and that this was really sort of just in time for them, that they needed some strategy to breathe through all of this. And that they not only found that, but they were reminded of the fact that they’re a part of this community that’s all struggling with this, because they’re feeling very isolated. 

And the same thing about our forums that we’re running. One of the themes that we heard was that they came into the forum really feeling overwhelmed. Like they were being asked to do all this new instructional stuff and they just didn’t know which way was up. But then they spent an hour talking to their colleagues who are experiencing similar challenges but who also had some ideas for them. And they left that hour once again, feeling just a little more grounded.
 

Q: Can you briefly describe the format of the wellness series? 

A: Those are really practice-based. We’re trying to give our members with both of those sessions, actual practices that they can engage in, in their everyday lives to help them be mindful as they move through this really unsettling time. So they’re practice based, and they’ll come into those sessions actually to have mindfulness moments and to engage in breathing exercises or to engage in exercises of compassion. So they’re actual practice sessions.
 

Q: What do our members have to look forward to in the future from the Center for Professional Learning.

A: What we’re looking forward to is, number one, developing our summer series, which will have three prongs to it. The first prong is to continue our regular programming. So we’re going to be running sort of a best of series of book discussions in webinars through the summer for things that our members have enjoyed throughout the year.

For our members who are looking for the kinds of supports I’ve just been talking about, we will continue to offer those through the summer – the wellness exercises, the member-to-member forums and the book discussions, particularly related to distance learning and wellness. 

And then the third prong of what we’re developing and rolling out through the summer and early fall is PEARL (Professional Education and Resources for Learning). And in PEARL we are also going to be including content related to wellness and perhaps related to online instruction. But we’ll also be developing a broader library of asynchronous online courses that our members can participate in there.
 

Q: Is there anything else you’d like members to know about these programs?

A: I would add that we are always trying to surmise and then meet member need. We don’t want to be developing anything in a vacuum. 

One of the questions that we ask is, “What else do you need?” And we really take seriously the fact that people answer that question. 

So, we really want to keep hearing from people about what they need to navigate our sort of new normal here. And as we hear that, we’ll continue to try to come up with programming to do what we can.