Professional Development Day

As a staff we are very fortunate to have the opportunity to participate in a Professional Development Day today. With no students on campus, the AEACMS faculty is focusing on standards-based instruction, prioritizing standards according to Bloom's Taxonomy, and creating interdisciplinary units of study to be used throughout the year. We are being assisted by Alex from Insight Education Group, Inc. from Los Angeles, CA.



Some of our morning work revolved around Marzano and Pickering's seminal book, "Classroom Instruction that Works." In groups, the faculty profiled the following research-validated instructional strategies and discussed their pros and cons within the classroom context:

• Cooperative Learning/Grouping
• Summarizing and Note-taking
• Identifying Similarities and Differences
• Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
• Cues, Questions, Advanced Organizers
• Setting Objectives/Providing Feedback
• Non-linguistic Representation
• Generating and Testing Hypotheses
• Homework and Practice
  

Today's work will lead into the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program trainings that the faculty will participate in this school year.