Professional Development for Sullivan Heights

We've had a huge success story about Sullivan Heights in regards to our individual plans of Professional Development of our teachers, letting them choose what they want to work on, considering that every teacher has different strengths and weaknesses, this only makes sense to us.  Teachers are more involved, more motivated because this is what they want to learn, and through our Grant we supply them with the material and support they need to grow and help change our school environment as well as their teaching practises.

We've done a lot of work on technology in our classrooms, as well as new methods of assessment, goal orientation and a lot more.  Now we're on to the next step, seeing if what we're doing is making a difference.  The only way to do that is through assessment again, but this time of our own practises.

The question is "Has the learning that the teacher done made a difference in our school?"  Although you can sometimes see this difference right away, there could be a number of other factors that have affected the student to make the change, so this year not only are teachers setting their individual goals but they are now using the SMART technique to assess if what they are trying to accomplish is making a difference.  Goals need to be clear, attainable, and measurable.  We need to share with colleagues in our school and outside of the school.  Although we started to do this last year (with some data showing a difference in some of the teachers learning) our goal is to increase the research basis of our learning, and to prove that we are making a difference with good solid data.  This is our goal for the end of the year, to show solid data on our blogs.  Is that a good enough SMART goal for you?  ;)

See the Prezi below for our intro in September....

Assessing our Learning on Prezi

Here is our new goal sheets.