Personalized Learning in Professional Development : Empowering Teachers Through Choice and Ownership of Learning Opportunities: for Personal Growth

In today’s educational world, teachers have been asked to acquire skills that support students with a variety of learning needs with little to no professional development to help them be effective. Personalized professional learning is a shift in how educator’s traditionally have been provided new learning, from sit-and-get, to a nontraditional format of giving teacher’s as much ownership in their learning pathway, which would allow them to be engaged in their own learning process. Professional development plans continue to not meet the diverse needs of all teachers and are not always conscious of financial challenges within the organization. Personalizing professional development for teachers will be a paradigm shift that will positively impact student learning and achievement, as well as teachers’ personal growth. Allowing teachers to create a personalized learning pathway through choice in topics and format of learning, presentation of information, and empowering teacher leaders among their colleagues are key characteristics of effective professional development. Through a mixed-method research study, this researcher interviewed and surveyed secondary teachers about their perceptions and experiences with professional development and found that teacher’s want to have their learning more personalized and tailored to meet their interests and content taught. Today’s administrators should be planning professional development that is personalized to meet each teacher’s individual needs to support student achievement and daily instruction.