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Professional Development Plan and Budget
Academic Year 2000-2001
Key Components
The key components to address in your Professional Development Plan and Budget are listed below. Please provide specific information in you descriptions of these areas so that we can better understand your goals for professional development and your alignment of resources to support these goals. We will also use this information to provide targeted support help you as you implement this plan.
TIP: For more information on any section, place cursor over yellow areas for two seconds.
1. Engagement of School Community:
The Instructional Leadership Team, Instructional Teams as well as the School Site Council were involved in the development of the Plan. Grade level representatives in the ILT as well as the ITís provided the necessary information that led to our considered decisions. These are the formal aspects of the discussions, however, added to this have been numerous conversations we have had over the years with other groups (parents, university partners, coaches) and individuals which added further substance and definition to our professional development plan.
2. Use of Coaches:
The Agassiz School has hired a Change Coach (BPE-BAC funds) for the coming school year. Sue Cornwallís main responsibility will be to provide training to all teachers (Grs.EC-5) in the use of one protocol for LASW. She will also be working with the ILT and ITís to support them through leadership development. This work is scheduled to begin in October. She will be here one day per week. The school has a full-time Success For All facilitator (funded through Title I) who works with teachers in grades K-5 throughout the school year in improving the implementation of the program. She schedules bimonthly component (Early Learning, Roots and Wings) level meetings to address skills development, SFA and standardized test alignment, assessment feedback, scaling up of the implementation of the model, etc. Our budget also has a full-time position for a Literacy Specialist as part of the Transition Program (funded through the Transition Program and Reading Excellence funds) . The person who occupied the half-time position last year left suddenly and therefore we are without those services. The Literacy Specialist would work with Level 1 students in grade 3 through tutorial, in-class and pullout sessions. She would also devote some time to grades 1 & 2 to bolster those teachersí support of Level 1 students. The school is fortunate to have a full-time Math Specialist (funded through the Transition Program budget). She is working with the same targeted students and grades and she is also coordinating the math assessments and their analysis for the whole school and facilitating the Math Leadership Team. All three, the SFA facilitator and the Literacy and Math specialists are members of the ILT.
3. Teacher Training in Guided Reading and Writers' Workshop:
The school has adopted the Success For All literacy model and therefore our teachers are not expressly receiving training in Guided Reading. That is an integral not a separate aspect of SFA training. This training takes place at the end of the summer during an intensive a one-day series of workshops designed for schools into their third or fourth year of implementation. Teachers new to the model receive three days of training on a particular component. There are also the two SFA implementation visits each visit lasting two days. These visits assess our progress and provide teachers with immediate feedback on the implementation of certain aspects of the program including guided reading. In so far as the Writersí Workshop, we have one third grade teacher who will go through a one-day training in October. However we were counting on our Literacy Specialist to have provided the guidance this year since she had attended many WW training sessions this past year. That is still an area of concern for the school and we hope that our new specialist can fill the void.
4. Use of School Resources and 18 Hours and Professional Development Days:
This past spring both the ILT and the School Site Council supported the use of the 18 hours for Looking At Student Work. The SAS document indicated that we had not shown sufficient progress in this essential. The faculty voted to spend 90 minutes after school once a month for LASW. Our new Change Coach will be providing training to all ITís in the use of one protocol. The Professional Development Days will be used for Success For All and Math Plan training. Staff from the SFA Foundation will be conducting that training and Dr. Mahesh Sharma will be in charge of the Math Plan training. Our BPE-BAC and Reading Excellence (state grant) funds will fund the SFA training and BPE-BAC funds alone will go towards Dr. Sharmaís training. Professional development of teachers beyond this could include workshops on differentiated instruction, further math training (see #5), further SFA training via its national conferences and training in the use of technologies available at the school site. These represent more than the required 18 contractual hours; however, we have set high expectations for our professional development. Our staff is eager to learn and we provide many learning opportunities. Funding through the BPE-BAC and the Reading Excellence grant will provide the necessary funds to pay for stipends and training contracts.
Peer coaching will become a topic of discussion as another means to gain and share best practices. A protocol that has been used at the Rafael Hernandez School, has been selected that will allow each teacher to engage in this process during the year. The expectation will be for all teachers to go through the process a minimum of one time preferably twice. The observations would take place during the SFA literacy block or at any other time. We have budgeted for substitutes through the Reading Excellence grant in order for classes to be covered.
The principal has started a Skillful Teacher seminar (based on selected readings from the book) for new teachers in the building as a means to support their professional development. This is strictly a voluntary activity that they have accepted enthusiastically. The group will meet about every two weeks during the year to discuss the selections and to share their reflections from the prior session. It is expected that they will keep a log of their observations/learnings. Each member of the seminar group will receive their own copy of the book. Funding to purchase the books comes through the Reading Excellence grant.
5. Implementation of Math Program:
The Agassiz is a Math Plan Level II school. We have a Math Leadership Team with representatives from grades K-5, the Math Specialist and the principal. Since we have a well-established literacy model we felt confident we could enter at this level. All MLT members will go through training in TERCís Investigations and the 24 hours of Developing Mathematical Ideas (DMI). The MLT will have the support of a math coach who will work with the teacher members in the implementation of Investigations and who will also be the DMI trainer. For the past year and a half we have been discussing in the ILT how to prepare ourselves to engage in deep math work. Since the math coachís services are provided solely to the MLT, we felt it was extremely important to find a way to provide professional development to the rest of the staff. Dr. Mahesh Sharma, who had previously worked with the Agassiz School, reestablished his relationship with us this spring through a couple of awareness sessions for the entire staff. We have engaged his services for this school year to provide training to all teachers in preparation for the full implementation of the Math Plan. His training will parallel that of the math coach. Dr. Sharma is also planing on offering workshops for parents so that they may also participate in reaching a new understanding of mathematics and therefore be able to assist their children.
6. Looking at Student Work:
As we stated earlier, LASW is an area of concern for the school and we have voted to use the 18 hours of professional development towards training in the use of one LASW protocol across the school. Grade level teams will meet once a month for 90 minutes after school throughout the year. Non-classroom teachers are also expected to participate and they will join one of the 7 ITís (EC-Gr. 5). We will also use some common planning periods for LASW since we have to look at ELA as well as Math student work. Our change coach will carry out training in the use of one LASW protocol during common planning periods in October. Cross-grade LASW sessions (1-2) will take place during the second semester. The ILT will review (Jan. & June) the results of LASW sessions to determine patterns in studentsí learning needs and any necessary professional development for teachers.
7. Formative Assessments:
The Agassiz School will be using a variety of formative assessments this year. In literacy our students (especially those in grades K-3) will undergo an intense period of reading assessment early in the year and at the end of the year. The Success For All assessments take place during the first two weeks of school for placement purposes and then students (Grs. 1-5) will be assessed every eight weeks to measure progress and to determine the next level placement. Students in grades K-3 will also participate in the Reading Excellence assessment program which utilizes the following assessments: the Yopp rhyme detection test, the Yopp-Singer Phoneme segmentation test, the Ekwall Shanker systematic phonics test, Marie Clayís Letter ID and Concepts of Print tests on phonemic awareness and reading comprehension and the Developmental Reading Assessment. These tests will be completed by the end of October and we will then have a large amount of data to analyze. Each one of those grades has a teacher who is the Reading Excellence lead person and she will facilitate the discussions related to the findings. The Literacy Specialist would have been the facilitator for those discussions. In her absence one of the administrators will co-lead the discussions. The information we gather will be used to inform Success For All reading instruction. Reading comprehension data will be used to determine if our placement levels are correct, phonemic awareness and phonics data will provide our Roots (Gr. 1 reading level component) teachers with areas to emphasize, our grade 1 one-on-one tutors will also use this data to target instruction. Our lower Wings (Gr. 2) teachers can use phonics data if we find this to be an area of need. The SFA facilitator will provide support to all ITís and SFA teachers in how to interpret the data and how it can be used in SFA classrooms.
Currently we use the Scott Foresman- Addisson Wesley Math Assessments on a quarterly basis. At the start of the school year we use the grade level inventory assessment to develop a grade level, classroom and individual student profiles. The results of the assessments are entered into a data base. These profiles give us information regarding the areas of strength and weakness of an entire grade, classroom and for each student. During common planning times grade level teams, with the support of the math specialist, analyze the data and develop appropriate plans to address the academic needs. We are particularly attentive to those students who fall into the Level 1 category. This yearís results will be shared with Dr. Mahesh Sharma so that his training will address some of the potential school-wide issues. The inventory assessment in September will provide us with baseline data that we will use to monitor studentsí progress via the quarterly use of SF-AW assessments. We also look forward to the use of the School Departmentís development of mid-year and end-of-year assessments as we move forward with the Math Plan.
Although studentsí writing is assessed as required by the BPS Benchmarksí Memorandum and writing portfolios are maintained, we have yet to develop a consistent, comprehensive approach to both direct instruction of writing (carefully examining and implementing this aspect of the ELA standards) and its assessment. One of our academic goals this year will be to introduce classroom teachers to Writersí Workshop and to explore the use of school-wide writing prompts. We are counting on our soon-to-be hired Literacy Specialist to undertake this task. There is a concern that, for a school such as ours which needs to attend to this area of literacy, we will not have enough time for LASW in writing when there is an expectation that math be the focus of LASW.
8. Safety Net Support:
The Success For All program targets low performing grade 1 students for extra support in a manner similar to Reading Recovery. The students who are in the lowest performing 20th% receive 20 minutes of daily one-to-one tutoring from trained teachers or paraprofessionals. The support is specific to what the child is being taught at the time in his SFA classroom. They typically stay in the tutoring program for a period of 6-8 weeks. As in all SFA situations, the language of instruction would be either English or Spanish. Also as part of the SFA program, there is a home reading program in the Roots component that teachers monitor on a daily basis. Classroom libraries have been established in all classrooms and we continue to support their growth. A well-stocked library makes it possible for students and their parents to fully engage in the home reading program. Books bought through Reading Excellence funds and the recent purchase by BPS of books for classroom libraries have gone along way to support this activity. SFA also has a parent outreach program designed to share with parents the many strategies teachers use in the classrooms that could also be used at home to support literacy development in the home. We host three workshops during the year which are facilitated by SFA teachers. Parents and their children share the experience together and the parents leave informed, prepared to help their children and we also give them books to read at home. We have set aside funds in the Reading Excellence grant to cover the cost of stipends for the teachers, the books and refreshments.
We have a Spanish Native Language Literacy program that provides support to students in Grades 3-5 who enter our school with little or no formal education. These classroom sessions are an accelerated means of making it possible for those students to more quickly access the appropriate curriculum.
Level 1 students in Gr. 3 will be receiving extra help via the Literacy Specialist who will not only work directly with the students through tutoring and pullout sessions but she will also support their teachers through modeling lessons and providing them with effective teaching strategies. This same approach will be used to support students and teachers in Gr. 2.
We currently do not have in place any one program to address the needs of regular education students in Grs. 4-5 who are low-performing. Two of our staff members are receiving training in Project READ this fall and we hope to use their newly acquired skills in the very near future as one way to support these youngsters. Students in those grade levels who are low-performing come to the attention of the Family Support Team (an SFA version of the Student Support Team). The FST meets every week on Monday mornings. This body collaborates with the teacher in analyzing the academic problems, brainstorms solutions and suggests alternative teaching strategies to support the studentsí learning.
We also will work with the Agassiz Community Centerís after-school program that is well attended by our students. They have agreed not only to keep us informed of who is attending their reading program so we can then keep the classroom teachers informed but also to work with us in establishing a consistent and focused approach in servicing those students.
Professional Development and Budget
Plan
SY 2000-2001
Budget Outline Page
School Name:
AGASSIZ
|
Line Item |
Grade(s) |
Total Cost |
Funding Source #1 |
Amount |
Funding Source #2 |
Amount |
Funding Source #3 |
Amount |
|
Professional Development |
|
Success for All Foundation |
K-5 |
$19,550 |
BPE-BAC |
$9,775 |
Reading Excellence |
$9,775 |
NA |
NA |
|
Math Training - Mahesh Sharma |
K-5 |
|
BPE-BAC |
$6,000 |
NA |
NA |
NA |
NA |
|
LASW Training Change Coach |
K-5 |
|
BPE-BAC |
$16,000 |
NA |
NA |
NA |
NA |
|
Skillful Teacher Seminars for new Teachers |
2-5 |
$400. |
Reading Excellence |
$400 |
NA |
NA |
NA |
NA |
|
Math Coaching |
Math team Leader |
BPS-Math Plan |
GSP |
NA |
NA |
NA |
NA |
NA |
|
Reading Excellence Summer Training |
READ Lead Teachers |
$6,000 |
Reading Excellence |
NA |
NA |
NA |
NA |
NA |
|
Capacity Building |
|
Substitutes for PeertCoaching |
K-5 |
$5,700 |
Reading Excellence |
NA |
NA |
NA |
NA |
NA |
|
Parent Involvement |
|
SFA Home Reading Program |
K-5 |
$5,000 |
Reading Excellence |
NA |
NA |
NA |
NA |
NA |
|
Math Parent Workshops |
K-5 |
Part of Dr. Sharma's Work |
BPE-BAC |
NA |
NA |
NA |
NA |
NA |
|
Parent Laison |
K-5 |
$5,000 |
BPE-BAC |
NA |
NA |
NA |
NA |
NA |
|
Safety Net Intervention Support |
|
Stipends for Teachers |
K-5 |
$4,000 |
Reading Excellence |
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|
Books/Materials for Parents |
K-5 |
$5,400 |
Reading Excellence |
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