Differentiating Professional Learning

The idea of differentiated learning for teaching professionals has come across my bow (coincidentally) quite a bit just recently. It is something that still baffles me. Obviously, learning opportunities in school staff rooms are very much at the hands of Leaders responsible for addressing learning, raising student achievement in identified target areas (data driven) along with building and maintaining the vision of the school.

That being said, educational professionals don't want to be 'wasting' their professional time sitting in sessions designed with early career professionals in mind. I don't think we are completely differentiating learning for our teaching staff at my school, and yet we are for certain things. And yet, I strongly believe that meeting together as a whole staff once a week is an essential part of our combined collegiality.

Differentiation has been modeled extremely well recently with our journey into the e-learning world. The very nature of incorporating ICT into our teaching practices demands differentiation. Teachers come to this with a wide range of skills, such that you cannot ignore the wide variety of learning requirements. While mathematics and literacy are being blended into this process wherever possible, the pedagogical learning required to teach mathematics and literacy are much less visible which makes professional learning in these areas much harder to differentiate.

Very recently @MNatusch has introduced the concept of Master classes for professional learning sessions at Vardon. These allow teachers to opt in to sessions they are interested in developing further.
I am wondering how we could develop the idea of Master classes further. I'm thinking about the possibility of starting and finishing teacher meetings together, with a series of 'open tables' in between. With our upcoming written language development being driven based on data... how do we make this happen?