Friday, October 7th we have our next district-wide PD Day. The purpose of the day is to provide educators with time to learn and build skills to help us better understand, support, and engage all of our learners. It’s time to focus on us and our learning because we know that educators impact student learning and thriving more than any other factor outside the family - research is clear on this. During our kick-off PD in August, you got a chance to work in teams to think about an “impact question” - a chance for your team to develop a question about how improving your Tier I inclusive practices impacts student learning. The hope was that with your colleagues you’d be able to start thinking about a specific focus for your own learning, related to our broad focus on understanding, supporting, and engaging our students. Here are some examples of ideas and possible extensions of learning which you shared:
Impact question
We wonder if we implement at least one practice in each part of the UDL framework we will see compelling evidence that SEL, behavioral and academic outcomes for all students improve?
We wonder what student outcomes research says the implementation of Project-based learning impacts and how we could measure those outcomes this year?
We wonder if we authentically engage students in the experiences that support Portrait of a Learner competencies throughout the regular curriculum will lead to students feeling more connected to and excited about these competencies?
Possible focus for October 7th
Maybe this group might listen to a UDL webinar on October 7th and then spend some time discussing what they learned, and identifying the practices they want to learn and implement this year.
Maybe each member of this group commits to finding a research study on PBL that they can read and share with the group and on October 7 they begin to design their own PBL unit.
Maybe this group agrees to reach out to one or more community partners to learn more about what they do and to think as a group about how they might be able to be included in activities that would enhance the curriculum or Inspired learning days.
The hope is that, like with students, the agency you have in thinking about this is energizing and enables you to get excited about learning something with your colleagues that you want to learn more about and that will enhance our desire to build our Tier I inclusive practices. We’re looking forward to hearing about your learning journey this year and how you actually see the impacts you hope to see on students.
You are shooting for working together for 3 hours and we are asking teams, regardless of your school, to start your learning time at 8:00a.m., like we usually do on full release days, and plan to end by 11:00a.m. to start the long weekend. You'll meet in your schools, or if your team has members from different schools, let your administrators know at which school you'll be meeting. Once your team has generated a description of what you will focus on and how you will approach your learning, we encourage you to enter the same description as each other in Teach Point using these directions for submitting a PD plan for October 7th in TeachPoint.
On October 7th, as always you will need to sign-in to the PD in Teach Point. The sign in code for the PD sessions will be 10/07/22. Here are the link to the sign-in instructions. If you run into trouble, Alyssa has devised a troubleshooting document that may be helpful.
Finally, each educator is asked to complete a follow-up survey to share what you accomplished and what is next. The form can be accessed here.
Please send any additional questions to Alyssa Lacasse ([email protected])