In my position of Director of Student Support/Alternative Ed, at the District Office I have seen the need for updated Staff Development for administrators in the area of Student Discipline. With everyone's busy schedule there is never enough time at district level meetings to cover the required annual staff development updates. Development of on-line classes/modules would be a way to meet this need. This assignment/reflection for module three will focus on an activity directed towards site administrators.
There are a number of pending bills being considered, this year, at the state level dealing with the abundance of student suspensions, especially for violation of Ed Code 48900 K, defiance and disruption. All of the pending bills remove defiance and disruption of school activities as a suspendable offense and would require administrators to find alternatives to suspension. The activity I would create would be targeted to site level administrators and designed to have them review the number of suspensions at their site and get them reflecting on possible alternatives. The first activity would be a thread discussion responding to a blog post on student suspensions?
The first post would require them to reflect on the suspensions for defiance and disruption at their site and what they would do if suspension was not an option. This would require them to analyze the the current suspensions for violation of 48900 (k) and explore other means to address the behavior. The power of them posting and responding to each other would also lead to them compiling different information and ideas which could lead to alternative solutions to suspension.
To minimize the challenges to administrators I would set up the Blog using Posterous as a private group. I would first explain and demonstrate how to sign up and post to the discussion at a face to face administrative meeting. Each administrator would then be invited to join and post to the discussion. The value of Posterous is the ability to post from a variety of devices including their computer at work or home, smart phone, ipad, or even as an email.
This initial activity would serve as an introduction to online staff development and reflection which would then be extended through the use of other Web 2.0 tools such as Google Docs and Google Sites to aggregate and review data.
These individual modules could also be incorporated and combined into a course for new and aspiring administrators.