Minimum day professional development topics
The first of seven minimum days for teacher Professional Development or PDS starts tomorrow. Students will be released early so PUSD teachers can meet to learn new educational strategies. Designed to help teachers better implement the new pedagogical shifts, these teaching practices are intended to assist in engaging students in more complex learning tasks.
PUSD district training topics are focused on helping to implement the new California state standards. Instructional leaders on campuses including principals, deans and instructional coaches, are pooling their talents to offer these trainings. This first month middle school and high school campuses are reviewing topics from last year’s trainings: close reading, DOK, CFU, writing and collaboration.
Placing tasks on the rigor/relevance matrix helps to identify the Depth of Knowledge or DOK level. Teachers increase rigor using questions higher up on Bloom’s taxonomy. Increasing relevance happens when assigning tasks that are more real world and apply to more than one disciple.
Infusing technology in an integrated fashion shortens feedback time and helps motivate student participation. Checks For Understanding can be enhanced with CFUS that are tech-based such as Socrative or Kahoot.it quiz. Both allow one-to-one devices to propagate a quick assessment of what students have retained so teachers can determine where to start reviewing. Formative checks for understanding help drive delivery of the curriculum in a more tailored fashion.
In October, subject specific groups will gather district-wide to focus on performance tasks. For example, science and health teachers will meet in the board room at the district office, PE folks will meet at Strathmore, and CTE Career and Technical Education are slated for the new library at PHS. Defining, writing and implementing these new more rigorous assessments called performance tasks will take some practice.
The first Wednesday in November, training is once again reserved for the individual campuses to follow up on the previous district-wide focus. Many sites have slated the topic of norming performance tasks using common rubrics to assess them.
In December the district-wide subject specific training will be on the new brain-friendly research focused on “sticky learning” or strategies that help make learning stick with students. Numerous books on the topic support ideas such as chunking the learning.
Memory is enhanced when learning is broken up into smaller chunks. Short-term memory fills up after 5-10 minutes of input so providing an opportunity to process and share that helps move it into longterm memory. This brain dump gives more room for input so the cycle can start again.
The follow up Professional Development or PD on site campuses in February will focus on some of the strategies that support brain-friendly learning such as infographics. Some campuses plan to introduce a website that teachers can use to create infographics for upcoming lessons to enhance retention utilizing the power of visual images. Student created infographics should summarize and report the gist of the content they just absorbed and digested.
Teachers will once again gather in content specific groups district-wide on March 2nd to focus on academic conversations. Last year teachers selected worthy text for close reading and then had students write from sources which involved gathering evidence from text to support claims in writing. Academic conversations provide the bridge piece between these two strategies of close reading and writing from sources. Students are trained to discuss content at a higher level with deeper meaning which enhances their ability to write about it.
On April 6, the follow up work on individual campuses will likely focus on Fisher and Frey’s book about Unstoppable Learning. Fisher asserts that every lesson should include the first speaking and listening standard with structured collaboration helps students digest and own the new content. Strategies for developing student led small group discussions utilizing the tier two and three vocabulary will likely be part of the training.
The new California state standards and practices are numerous, but this year’s professional development trainings will zero in on strategies that help to implement multiple integrated standards at once.
The district wide PD topics are Performance Tasks, Sticky Learning and Academic Conversations. The month after each is reserved for campus follow up to meet staff needs on these topics.