ACSR offers a complete range of professional development services that provide ongoing support for teacher improvement and growth. Job-embedded professional learning focuses on specific areas of school improvement, providing instruction, modeling, and feedback during multi-day institutes, ongoing workshops throughout a school year, professional learning community (PLC) sessions, and specific coaching sessions with individuals and teams of educators.
Workshops Woven Throughout the School Year
We will design and facilitate regular workshops throughout a school year with a focus on the content and themes that you request. Full or half-days each month are optimal to meet your needs to begin and successfully implement a desired adult learning initiative. Examples of this work include renewing school climate & culture, developing place-based education units, and exploring connecting project-based learning with curriculum standards. We will tailor ongoing workshops to meet your needs.
Multi-day Institutes
We offer multi-day professional development institutes on content and themes on which you need to focus. Three or five day institutes scheduled in the summer are typical. This option includes gaining an understanding of foundational content, experiential learning, modeling by facilitators, and planning time woven throughout the days. Examples include the Critical Skills, Nature-based, and Professional Learning Community institutes. We will design multi-day gatherings to meet your needs.
Professional Learning Communities (PLCs)
Our PLC training and facilitation have taken two different forms in recent years. First, we support the creation of groups of six to ten teachers and administrators who commit themselves to learning together. They hold each other accountable for continuously adapting their practice to meet the needs of all learners, share resources and ideas, support each other in implementing new practices, and collaborate by using meeting protocols. Whether they call themselves teacher learning teams, professional learning communities, critical friends, or members of a collaborative team, the commitments they hold are the same. They are reflective, make their practice public, frame meaningful questions, ask for feedback, challenge assumptions, and believe that together they are more capable than they are alone. ACSR is a center of activity of the School Reform Initiative (SRI), and we have faculty who are trained PLC coaches. We offer beginners coaches training, support experienced coaches, and train school leaders in our five-day training titled “Facilitative Leadership: Coaching for School Leaders.”
Second, we offer regular PLC gatherings specifically to increase teacher understanding of nature-based teaching and learning. These groups are similar in size, about ten people, meet at least monthly, and are characterized by members sharing progress on nature-based integration and learning specific, new content (e.g. risk management, establishing outdoor classrooms, curriculum integration) from the group facilitator. These nature-based PLCs are tailored to the needs of an individual school or district.