Professional Development
By collecting Multi-Dimensional Needs Assessment evidence specific to your school’s stakeholder’s perceptions, our professional development utilizes the analysis to build upon your schools’ strengths and improve your challenges. Often on the professional development side of the education business many want to charge you an arm and a leg for their dynamic dog and pony show. Though there are many excellent speakers providing professional development to educators, unfortunately many of the services offered or topics covered are of little interest or use to the majority of your educators. Most often they are inspirational speakers that might get your educators rejuvenated for a short time, but typically the educators are left wondering how they can use such information to improve their instruction or leadership. Research shows that typically little of what is learned through professional development is actually integrated into practice.
The goal of MDed, however, is to provide you with “Solutions and not just Statistics!” And when it comes to professional development we want to give you “Solutions not just Stories!” This is why we often begin our professional development efforts by collecting evidence specific to your school’s stakeholder’s perceptions. This evidence allows us to help you take a evidence-driven approach to making systemic change in your schools. We believe that you must first know where your strengths and challenges truly exist before you begin any type of organizational systemic improvement plan or begin to consider professional development needs.
To achieve this goal our reports (see Support Materials page) are presented in a fashion that all stakeholders in your district can understand. Our reports also provide you with the graphics needed to create powerful PowerPoints to share with your staff and stakeholders. The Multi-Dimensional Needs Assessment is designed to provide an analysis that pinpoints your schools’ strengths and challenges. This allows us to work with you more (strategically) to target the various dimensions. By doing this you are able to determine if the professional development you offer should be more focused on a specific dimension such as: Community or Parent Engagement, School Climate, Educational Attitudes or Developmental Perspectives. Additionally, if you are a school system that fully embraces the power of MDed’s Systemic Model for Educational Change, and would like for us to work more closely with your educators, we offer a comprehensive menu of professional development efforts customizable to your specific needs.
Our staff and highly qualified consultants are ready and available to work with your schools. MDed offers an assortment of keynotes, workshops, seminars, and webinars related to our evidence-driven insights. No matter if we are providing professional development based on our MDNA reports of your school, or speaking about the process our book with Corwin Press explains, we strive to entertain, inform and most of all help your educators put what they learn from our professional development to work in the schools. As some educators have told us, we “turn sadistics into statistics” and we “put the F-word back into education”; Fun. We also have a great number of collaborative partners in professional development that we often recommend when our data identifies specific needs of your school system.
Yet whether you want our staff or our collaborative partners to work with your educators for an hour or a month, at MDED we are ready to provide you with the data-driven professional development you desire and need. Just call us today to discuss your specific needs. However, if budgets are tight in your district, we also offer many of our professional development workshops for free on our web site (see MDED Resources page) or for a reduced cost via online formats.
