An Outline of my Professional Growth Plan (2013-14)

Professional Growth Plan (2013-2014)

Issue Statement:
Many tasks that we have students do in classes do not completely develop the skills students need to be successful in the 21st century.

Indicators for success:

• My working with a group of teachers or department collaboratively developing a set of higher order thinking skills that students need to be successful beyond their secondary education
• That as a group of educators, we begin analyzing a set of tasks used currently to determine whether the tasks they are using lead to the skills they wish for their students to acquire
• We begin a cycle of inquiry by co-creating a task or tasks (and concurrent assessments) that we believe will lead to these skills
• We begin a cycle of pedagogical observations to increase our capacity to facilitate these execution of these tasks with students
• We reflect on these observations, and use them to drive our collaborative meetings to improve teacher and student achievement.

Goal:
To develop an inquiry model that increases student and teacher achievement through collaboratively developed skill targets, co-creation of tasks that specifically lead to those targets, and observations of pedagogical practices that best lead to their being mastered.

Staff Outcome:
A group of volunteers will have worked together through a reflective cycle to determine a skill, create a task, analyze its execution through a lesson, measure the learning by their students, and refine the task and its delivery.

Student Outcome:
The students will develop skills that will equip them for success beyond secondary school through a task/tasks aimed specifically at developing those skills.

My Outcome:
Through working with other educators on the co-creation of skill targets and commensurate tasks, I will develop a higher level of proficiency at connecting the desired skill being taught and the task being administered.  As well, I will begin to address areas for growth from the Instructional Leadership Quadrant of the BCPVPA Leadership Standards, including:

• Monitoring the learning environment and the impact on student learning
• Ensuring an accountability system is in place to monitor for teaching and learning that supports student achievement
• Ensuring the use of differentiated instruction and assessment strategies to meet the needs of all students
• Ensuring the use of a variety of appropriate assessment measures to evaluate student learning and for school planning 
• Ensuring the use of a variety of appropriate assessment measures to evaluate student learning and for school planning

 Action Plan:

• Read Instructional Rounds - completed Summer, 2012
• Meet with Art Blackwell to determine a time at which we can observe another district doing Instructional Rounds--SD 23 is in progress with IR (January, 2013)
• Select a group to do visitation (Spring, 2013)
• Vistation to Glenrosa Middle School to observe IR process (Spring, 2013)*
• Bring concept to a group of volunteers interested in IR
• Select group to attend Instructional Rounds training in Boston, Mass. (Spring, 2013 or Fall, 2013)*
• In conjunction with partner groups, begin development of model that works for School District #73 (Fall 2013-Spring 2014)*
• Present model to larger group of volunteers (Spring-Fall 2014)*
• Begin implementation!  

* requires district support