School Development Plan: A professional Development Session

A professional development session on School Development Plan (SDP) was conducted for the teachers of a public sector school in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. The session was kicked off by conducting a brainstorming activity on SDP. The teachers on the basis of their experience and prior knowledge shared their ideas and the facilitator briefly wrote down their responses on the whiteboard. Then the facilitator gradually developed the session by giving input on the areas of SDP through an oral presentation. 

During the presentation, the teachers were provided with opportunities to discuss some important points. They shared their ideas with the help of relevant examples regarding the topic. After the presentation, the teachers selected the activities to be included in SDP which would be implemented in the forthcoming months of the current academic session.  Active involvement of teachers was observed in selecting and organizing activities in SDP. Some creative ideas were found to be discussed among the teachers.

During the session, it was observed that the teachers selected meaningful and relevant learning activities for maximizing students’ learning. After the discussion on each point, the teachers provided feedback to each other and to the whole group for further improvement of the designed learning activities. They passed valued arguments and challenged each others’ arguments by providing pieces of evidence. At the end of each discussion and debate, the facilitator concluded the discussion in the form of collective feedback in order to clarify the misconceptions which were prevailed among them.

On an analysis conducted of the above-mentioned data, it was found that respecting the ideas of the participation in a professional session ensures active involvement of the participants. Starting the session with an engaging activity, concurrent input followed by taking the responses of the participants and collective feedback enhances the effectiveness of the session. Therefore, it is recommended that during professional development sessions, plan the session keeping in mind the audience, start with an appealing activity, furnish the participants with relevant content, involve them in productive discussion and conclude each and every discussion to achieve the set objectives.