Personal Work Negotiation Plan

Personal Work Negotiation Plan

Tim Wilson

At my school, St. Francis College in São Paulo Brazil, I am currently the educational technology integration specialist.  I have been asked, by the heads of school, to provide some professional development sessions on technology, namely Google Apps, for teaching staff.  We have traditionally not done a whole lot of professional development for our staff and more so have never tracked professional development other than who has completed the required IB training. 

What I am proposing is that I become the person in charge of all professional development.  I think it would be beneficial to centralize the listing of what professional development individual teachers have attended or undertaken so that the rest of the teaching community can benefit from their learning.  The school is also pushing hard for teachers to work in transdisciplinary units.  With the overview of the teachers’ interests and strengths I would be able to suggest quality units incorporating two or more subject areas.  

            My interests are several.  First is to best facilitate teaching and learning.  Second is to help develop a culture of learning within our wider community, teachers, parents, and administrators.  The students are not the only ones who are learning.  This is probably the biggest motivation for me.  Our school has a fairly toxic atmosphere and I would like to affect that through “grassroots” initiatives.  And third, quite frankly, I would like to give myself some more administrative experience in creating and implementing systems into a school. 

I will be pitching this idea to the head of primary and the head of secondary at our school.  I would anticipate that their interests would be fairly similar to my own.  I would know that they have an interest in training our teachers in, at the very least, using Google Apps to enhance efficiency as well as teaching and learning.  The system I would implement would satisfy this interest and go beyond.  One interest that differs from mine would be the cost of training teachers.  I would mitigate this constraint by researching and informing teachers of free, online professional development opportunities.  I have already found several online professional development seminars or webinars and promoted them to the staff through my blog.  Another interest that the school may have is consistency in the professional development system.  Centralizing all of the staff’s information, attendance, and areas of interest, I think, would be seen as a benefit.  An interest that the school may have that would differ from my own is that I am not on the “administration team” and they wouldn’t want to give up any control or would see me as having a hidden agenda. 

My BATNA would be to scale down and continue to only do the small training sessions on integrating technology into the classroom in hopes that the training provided there gets recognized as valuable and then can be expanded in the term or year to come.  This is not a bad alternative, because I am also aware of the amount of work and follow up that would be involved in creating a tracking system and making sure that teachers are following through with their responsibilities.  The school’s BATNA would be fairly similar and is generally their default, to say ‘yes that’s a good idea, let’s try that next term or next year’. 

The ideal outcome would be for the school to adopt my system of tracking and requiring a certain number of hours of professional development of the teachers, while fully supporting reasons for why we should be engaging in personal professional development.  Even more ideally, shooting for the stretch goal, would be having the school set aside a specific budget for each teacher to put towards professional development. 

After negotiations are complete, the careful monitoring of the professional development that the teachers are choosing to engage in as well as communicating the professional development opportunities available will be critical to the success of this initiative.   The role out of the system is also very important.  If the school leaves it solely up to me to role out there will be minimal buy-in.  It is crucial for the leadership to buy-in to this first and then support the system by often reiterating the ‘why’ we believe professional development is important.