Dr Sarah Copeland, Lecturer in Digital Education from University of Leeds was a speaker at PebbleBash 2024 and presented ‘PebblePad and CPD’. Click here to watch the video with the full transcript or if you’re having trouble viewing the video above.
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I’m Sarah Copeland. I’m at the University of Leeds, and I’m gonna talk to you today about a different type of CPD, and that’s continuing personal development.
Now I’ve attempted to make it a little bit interactive. We’ll see how that goes in the pet. So do you get your phones out because I’ve got a couple of QR codes. So what is personal development?
Borrowing from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and assuming that psychological and safety needs have been met, we’re moving into a space where we’re exploring social belonging, forms of esteem, and eventually aiming towards the concept of self actualization, where we can begin to understand our place in the world. And why is it important? Well, Hughes has set out some key themes around personal development, and it’s really thinking about the important things in life.
So the pursuit of happiness, the quality of life, changing personal habits to start being able to think about greater self awareness, and thinking positively about our own goal setting.
So back in lockdown, what I started thinking was that I was a few years away from my fiftieth birthday milestone.
And beyond that, I was facing an emptiness. And I was wondering what the next chapter in my life might have in store. I started thinking that I really needed to get a handle on my work life balance because I do have a terrible tendency to prioritise projects and work long hours because I get very captivated by interesting things.
And COVID upset that work life balance for so many of us. And I’m sure lots of us in the room will have a shared experience of how intense it was at that time.
But I wanted to start prioritising my life experiences.
And, this wasn’t about a bucket list. This was about setting intentions, about daily practices I could bring into my everyday life to start prioritising things that I wanted to do.
So, this is about achievable goals for me. And I started keeping notes on my phone through, the app called KeepNotes.
And it was just a really handy way because it was always in my pocket and I could bring it out and add something on that I wanted to do in the year before and the year after my fiftieth birthday.
But it did become quite unwieldy, and I thought, I actually have got the perfect tool available to me in my pocket. So, I opened up PebblePad and I created a portfolio, and you can get hold of my portfolio if you use the QR code on that screen there.
So, this is about reflective practice, and why wouldn’t it be? I’m sure all of us in the room are really committed to practicing that reflection ourselves, or at least we really truly believe in the principle of it, even if we don’t necessarily make time to do it on a daily basis. And we’re thinking about the pedagogy of portfolio in our everyday work in delivering teaching, and it absolutely makes sense for us to bring that power of reflective practice into our personal life and to really think about how happy we can be just being in the world and making So I wanted to use my alumni account first and foremost because that’s where I keep all of my CPD work, like professional development work, and it made sense to do that.
I wanted to create a shareable version, which you’ve hopefully now seen. But because I was making it public, I wanted to minimise personal details inside it. But I also wanted to keep a reflective journal, and this is the important part, isn’t it? So I created a second comparable, reflective portfolio, and I needed to stream have a quick way of streamlining my updates between the two.
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