Michigan Virtual Supports State with Professional Learning Services

Hello. My name is Emily Cecilia, assistant director of professional learning at Michigan Virtual. Team works with organizations and schools around the state and beyond to bring best practices and resources to Michigan educators. Not only do we offer face to face trainings, but we also have a catalog of more than two hundred and fifty courses, many of which offer sketches for completion. Some are self paced, some are facilitated, depending on what you would like and how you would like to learn. We offer courses and universal design for learning. We offer courses in social and emotional learning, assessment practices. And we've worked with many organizations as I mentioned to offer the best to Michigan educators in terms of professional development. We're always looking for what's new and next, and so something we've recently tried is bringing a beloved TV series, Ted Lasso, to Michigan educators. You've heard of a book study? This is a TV series study. Where we look at season one of Tadlasso and how it applies to the classroom. Our cohorts who have gone through this program have shared that they really appreciated the different perspectives of watching the program and applying it to their classroom. They felt like the activities were designed with intentionality and really used it to apply to their own classroom practice and with their students. They also appreciated the ability that any grade level or discipline, the learnings applied to. As well as the facilitators were not only intentional in their content creation, but excited to share the learning experience with our participants. So, I invite you to check out all of the options that Michigan virtual provides and offers chicken educators for professional learning. I would like to just take this opportunity to share with you the experience I've had with the Michigan virtual professional learning portal and how I've utilized that even beyond my own professional growth. So I probably in January started looking specifically wanting some targeted professional development for myself such as some project based learning things, a little bit more about SEO or strategies to how, you know, the trauma informed classroom, things that were really impacting what was going on here at my high school. So I started with those and I've just used so many of those resources beyond with my staff, some videos articles that I have I have found, I have shared with my staff. And one specific one I would just highly recommend is they did a series of professional development on the Ted Lasso series. And we watched different episodes and then we would get together in the Zoom with Michigan virtual facilitator, and we would talk about, you know, Ted Lasso and the messages and the leadership and all those things that if you haven't watched the series, you'll learn. And even in that, those Zooms, I learned some great strategies that I was able to take back for, like, the adult learning with professional development here at my high school. So if you have not had the opportunity to check it out, I encourage you to check out the Michigan virtual professional learning I've even shared different professional learnings with my staff like, hey, you're struggling with this, have you noticed this? My colleagues, everybody's