Over the last seven years, PowerMyLearning has worked with more than 70 schools in New York City, Los Angeles, Atlanta and the San Francisco Bay Area, providing tools and professional development services to strengthen the triangle of learning relationships that connects students, teachers and families.
We are not the first to appropriate classroom-based frameworks and tools to professional development settings.
A quality education is supported by three key pillars: ensuring access to quality teachers; providing use of quality learning tools and professional development; and the establishment of safe and supportive quality learning environments.
In her "Nine Reasons Teachers Should Use Twitter", she lists, erm, nine reasons why it is a useful tool for professional development.
A survey was administered to elucidate participants' attitudes towards and perceptions of the Web as a tool for professional development.
In addition, for the mentor and the protégé, mentorship is a tool of professional development (Kram 1988), and improves work satisfaction (Hunt and Michael 1983).
The recent proliferation of social media platforms, and a growing recognition of social media as an effective tool for professional development (McCulloch et al. 2011), means that further investigation is needed to better understand if and how social networking can best be harnessed to provide support for teachers and to improve teacher retention.
Despite disagreement in the literature about how action research should be implemented (Beaulieu, 2013), we see that action research is not only a tool for professional development and lesson improvement, but also could serve as an avenue for engaging teachers in scholarship.
The profiles can also provide a tool for professional development staff to identify the specific needs of their particular population of faculty members.
Larger numbers of physicians are using the Internet to locate and seek medical information and it has been suggested that one of its greatest benefits is as a tool for professional development [ 1- 3].
