Professional Development

Staff members build teaching skills and concepts by participating in ongoing professional development. Banked-minute days provide valuable time for teacher collaboration, planning, and instructional collaboration. The District offers staff development days annually where teachers participate in a variety of professional growth opportunities in curriculum, teaching strategies, and methodologies.

The District has received numerous grants for professional development including Reading First. The majority of District elementary and language arts teachers have participated in AB 466 professional development, a 40-hour summer program focused on the effective implementation of standards in reading and language arts. At Lydia Jackson Elementary School, teachers receive individual support from the site Literacy Coach. All new teachers attend a training/coaching program in which they learn about the District's curriculum

Language Arts & Math: Teachers receive 40 hours of professional development training in the Language Arts and Mathematics adopted textbooks. Forty hours of follow-up including analysis of student work and assessment results using a specific protocol are used to develop intervention/action plans for immediate implementation.

Curriculum Alignment: Teachers will follow the standards-aligned curriculum as determined by the Essential Agreements and action plans completed during summer training. Pacing guides and end-of-unit action plans will be used to monitor teacher lesson plans and to monitor students' progress toward standards.

Grade Level Team Meetings: Teachers meet on a regularly scheduled basis to reflect on program implementation/pacing, analyze students' assessment data, and to plan and organize in-class and outside-of-class interventions.  Getting Results is our support provider for collaboration and data analysis with a goal of improving instruction through grade level team work.

ELA:  Our teachers are receiving training on Writers Workshop to improve student skills in the area of writing.

Intervention Programs: All staff is trained in effective intervention programs for struggling students, including differentiated instruction in Language Arts and Math.

ELD/SDAIE: Teachers implement strategies learned in GLAD training to improve student achievement of EL students.  This year our teachers are participating in 3 days of Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol to support their work with our English learners.

Instructional Aides: The Literacy Coach trains the instructional aides on how to plan and organize activities to meet the needs of at-risk students. Each Tuesday the aides meet with the coach to review current strategies and review work produced by students.

Custodians: Custodians are trained to use the new restroom extracting machine, the proper procedure on how to clean a restroom, and all other district level training.