Tag: Professional Development & Learning

Artifact: Boston Green Academy’s Instructional Rounds

Boston Green Academy’s November 2023 instructional rounds protocol outlines a structured approach to classroom observation and improvement. The document details the observation schedule, including dedicated times for classroom visits, feedback sessions, and debriefing meetings. It also provides note-taking sheets to guide observers during classroom walkthroughs and may include additional resources like rubrics or reflection prompts to support the observation and feedback process. This structured protocol ensures consistency and focus, allowing the BGA educators to effectively evaluate and enhance its teaching and learning practices.

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August 13, 2024

Artifact: Fenway High School’s Vision for Professional Development

Fenway High School prioritized collaboration among teachers, counselors, and college partners to build a comprehensive support system for students. By providing training on effective use of advisory periods, office hours, and tutoring, the school aimed to enhance student success. To address the specific goal of improving literacy and comprehension, teachers participated in inquiry groups focused on developing instructional strategies. These strategies included creating text sets, scaffolding complex texts, and building vocabulary to prepare students for college-level coursework.

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August 13, 2024

Natick Public Schools’ Superpower EdTech Tools

A set of six edtech tools endorsed by Natick Public Schools that are widely usable and meet a series of key criteria were identified as part of the 2023-24 EdTech Peer Learning Cohort, facilitated by The Learning Accelerator (TLA) in partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Office of Educational Technology.

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July 5, 2024

Rethinking Compensation in Innovative Learning Models

Fully virtual and hybrid learning contexts present an incredible opportunity to rethink educator compensation as a tool for recruiting and retaining effective, high-quality teachers and responding to a call for greater professionalization in the field. This policy brief from The Learning Accelerator (TLA) explores three key components – salary and benefits, professional opportunities and growth, and working conditions – and how they factor into compensation that responds to the needs and expertise of educators.

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May 7, 2024

ExcEL Leadership Academy Micro-credential Pathway Adoption in Rhode Island

Despite calls to modernize education preparation, the way we train, support, and grow educators has remained largely unchanged for decades. But some educator training and professional development organizations are taking a different approach by offering educators flexible and job-embedded learning opportunities that recognize and validate learning through demonstrations of competence.

Educators earn “micro-credentials” in the form of digital badges, which capture both the skill the educator demonstrated and the evidence they used to prove their mastery of that skill.

This case study offers a look at one micro-credential program, developed by UCLA’s ExcEL Leadership Academy that has been approved for ESOL teacher certification in Rhode Island. The program offers a progression of 12 micro-credentials focused on the skills and competencies educators need to serve multilingual learners (MLLs) effectively. Additionally, the case study offers recommendations for other states that hope to offer their educators high-quality competency-based pathways to certification and/or professional growth.

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March 1, 2024

Agency by Design: An Educator’s Playbook

Here is the book you’ve been waiting for – “Agency by Design: An Educator’s Playbook!”

This book is a call to action, providing the tools, strategies and user friendly rubrics to guide you as you unlock the potential of your students, as they embrace their personal ownership of learning. This resource is a mix of the theoretical with the practical steps taken from lived experiences from educators, who, like you, desire more for their students in their learning experience.

Essential components found within the Playbook are explicitly defined support-systems in terms of the rationale (the why), a deeper look at what agentic behavior looks like when the teacher creates the conditions for agentic behaviors and the characteristics seen in students when they become more agentic in their behaviors. Importantly, opportunities are included for you to reflect on the text and access rubrics for benchmarking and planning.

As an added benefit, you can download each of the 14 chapters listed below separately by clicking on the linked headings!

Conditions Created by Teachers:

  1. Motivation and Engagement
  2. Support and Supervision
  3. Measuring Success
  4. Learning Environments
  5. Design of Learning
  6. Curriculum
  7. Acts of Teaching

Characteristics Observed in Students

  1. Collaboration
  2. Digital Literacy
  3. Assessment for Learning
  4. Learners as Leaders
  5. Competencies for Life
  6. Learner-Driven Learning
  7. Assessment Capability
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October 13, 2023
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