Describe a professional growth plan. A group of colleagues and I chose to be in an SEL (social-emotional learning) group and were given the task of building trust within the department (EC – Early Learning) and how to make things better for future academic years. We had many ideas at the beginning of this academic year and were full of energy but unfortunately, the lack of time to meet, and lack of motivation, inability to meet the team on a regular basis due to different schedules we all had made it extremely hard to accomplish everything we originally wanted. We were able to do a survey where we asked specific questions but the response was not 100 %, My personal opinion is that the department did not trust to respond with confidence and was afraid their answer will get them in trouble. We used SurveyMonkey to reassure them it was anonymous but responses were still low. Most of the responses we did receive were very similar, peers seem to feel overwhelmed, were not treated as professionals, were not given autonomy to make decisions within their classrooms, wanted more time to work on lesson plans or meet their teams for planning, feedback, and discuss upcoming events and due dates. Although a lot of the answers were very similar a lot of them did point out our SLT (senior leader team) and seem to have a different feeling towards our principal and vice-principal. If given the chance again to work on this, I would do things differently, focus ONLY on 2-3 items so we can fully commit and see it through. Next academic year half of this group will no longer be working here but I would like to continue with this project if it is possible and hopefully use it as the next year PGP instead of starting a new as it has been done in the previous years where we start and new PGP and the old just ends regardless.
