TLC for Everyone!

Looking ahead to next year, the face of our professional development is changing….or better stated, professional learning. The current Professional Development Team is being rebranded as the:

With this name change, we will shift our focus to getting teachers talking about teaching and learning and reflecting on our practice. As Math/Science Division Head, Jason English, said during our most recent meeting, “When I reflect on my career up to this point, I can say that without a doubt, the biggest impact on my professional growth has been through learning in communities. Whether it be Physics Northwest (a group of physics teachers that meets monthly to share ideas) or my Master’s cohort with other D214 teachers, collaborating with like-minded people has pushed me and ultimately benefitted my students.”

In order to support regular conversations about our craft, the TLC reps will now meet seven times a year. The meetings will take place on a Tuesday and then we will keep our professional sharing and learning going in each division on our Thursday morning late starts by continuing the conversation. Ideally this set-up will allow us time to keep our great, effective conversations as a regular part of our professional learning.

Next year the goal of the group will be to focus on clarity. We started our work by defining what clarity means to us, what clarity looks like, and its importance in the classroom. As part of our meeting last week, we worked on an activity looking at our course syllabi / expectations through the lens of providing clarity to our students and their families.

We followed these steps to facilitate our conversation:

The activity was very eye-opening.  While we used our syllabi / course expectations as a starting point, the deeper concept of overall clarity in our course led many of us to brainstorm great ideas to use in our own classrooms - all from having a focused, professional conversation with our peers.  

Additionally, we would like to use our time next year to discuss, and learn from each other, how our methods of student engagement and literacy support this goal of clarity.

The representatives of the TLC are:

Dawn Bodden Kevin Carroll Joe Disilvio Kent Dyer Jason English Kara Fisher Lee Ann Haralambakis

Mike Kic Maryann Kopeny Mary Luckritz Brenda Martin Kitty Moy Andrew Prazeres

Linda Pribyl Greta Rakow Joy Ruckoldt Ann Syversen Bullis Joe Szabo Stephen Traphagen Dave Wietrzak

We are looking forward to a wonderful year of productive, engaging, conversations that will further enhance our already awesome classrooms.

Co-authored by:

Ms. Dawn Bodden (Teaching and Learning Facilitator) &

Ms. Ann Syversen Bullis (Division Technology Coach)