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Professional Development
Dear School Community:
Since our schools were closed
last Friday, January 17th for teacher professional development (PD) it
seems like an opportune time to share updates on progress we've made
toward District Goal 5 in the strand of Professional Learning.
Our goal is "to
increase opportunities for faculty to engage in targeted and job-embedded
professional learning."
During last week's PD, our
teachers engaged in value-setting as part of a reflective exercise designed
to establish a set of individual and shared values so that, as a community,
we may think more deeply about how our values are operationalized in our
classrooms and how they are prioritized in our instruction. As
pictured above, kindness, respect and compassion were the values our
teachers identified as being critical to them.
Additionally, we also piloted
our first-ever Ed.
Camp, which is an innovative professional learning
construct educators use to share ideas in an interactive and highly
participatory environment. Ed. Camps use candid dialogue as the basis
for sharing experiences, promising ideas and techniques to improve
professional learning systems. All topics were generated by teachers for teachers.
 
Outside of January's full-day
PD, our teachers are showing a commitment to their own professional growth
by engaging in learning efforts this year that include:
- English/Language
Arts (ELA) PD as part of a transition to a more balanced literacy
framework in Grades K-6.
- Job-embedded
coaching in support of new instructional materials for middle school
ELA teachers who teach our Reading Foundations courses.
- Continued
PD for our expansion of Go Math. We are nearing full
implementation across Grades K-8.
- PD
and coaching provided by the NJ Coalition for Inclusive Education to
enhance our interventions for struggling students and to focus more
deeply on the principles of high yield instruction.
- Diversity
and global awareness PD for a cohort of Brearley Middle-High School
teachers invested in incorporating more social justice work into
teaching, learning and our school community.
- Supporting
teachers in out-of-district PD requests around such topics as:
motivating students, math workshop, small group instruction and
differentiation to name just a few.
In closing, please keep in
mind that January is a common time for student effort to wane and for
apathy about school to grow. If you're looking for a reminder of
at-home study tips that may help to reinforce effective academic behaviors,
check out our January
Leadership Blog on this topic written by our
Supervisor of Curriculum & Instruction, Lauren Bound. You can
access it here. https://www.kenilworthschools.com/board_of_education/leadership/leadership_blogs/january_2020
Have a great weekend,
Kyle C. Arlington
Superintendent of Schools
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