Teacher Professional Development

Welcome to NEA Academy, NEA's Web site devoted to meeting the professional needs of teachers and education support professionals!  Here you'll find the highest quality courses from the best developers. All professional development courses offered through the NEA Academy are carefully screened against a set of quality standards developed by NEA members in consultation with the National Staff Development Council.  Only the best courses of the highest quality make it through the screening process.

The Visible Knowledge Project (VKP) is a five-year project aimed at improving the quality of college and university teaching through a focus on both student learning and faculty development in technology-enhanced environments. The Project involves over 70 faculty from 21 campuses nationwide.

Open teaching is described as the facilitation of learning experiences that are open, transparent, collaborative, and social. Open teachers are advocates of a free and open knowledge society, and support their students in the critical consumption, production, connection, and synthesis of knowledge through the shared development of learning networks.

Through the guiding principles of open teaching, students are able to gain requisite skills, self-efficacy, and knowledge as they develop their own personal learning networks (PLNs). Educators guide the process using their own PLNs, with a variety of teaching/learning experiences, and via (distributed) scaffolding.

This metaphor projects the role of teacher as one who “knows the terrain”, helps to guide students around obstacles, but who is also led by student interests, objectives, and knowledge. The terrain in this case consists of the development of media literacy (critique & awareness), social networks (connections), and connected/connective knowledge