Professional Development

One of my favorite parts of my job as a curriculum coordinator has been planning and leading professional development sessions for teachers. I know a lot of teachers reflect on their teaching via their blogs. Since I don’t have a classroom, I’ve taken the opportunity to reflect on some of my professional development sessions over the years:

• Adventure Time – In my first year as a curriculum coordinator, I was tasked with leading a year-long professional development program with roughly 100 elementary interventionists. This post details our first session together.
• And Now For Something a Little Different – One of the things I struggle with in my job is reaching as many of our 1,200 elementary teachers as possible. This post details our efforts to try to reach more of them through after school sessions.
• A Day in the Life of a Curriculum Coordinator: Wednesday – While taking part in a #MTBoS blogging challenge, I wrote this post detailing PD sessions I led around fractions for our 3rd and 4th grade teachers.
• Building Understanding in Two Dimensions – This is a post from my other blog where I wrote about a professional development session related to teaching geometry.
• Talking Up Talking Points – In this post I talked about how I used Talking Points during one of the PD sessions I led with our district interventionists.
• Twelve Hours of Number Talks – Over a two-day period I was able to reach nearly 150 teachers and introduce them to number talks.
• Math Rocks – Each year my colleague Regina and I lead a cohort of elementary teachers through a 7-month PD journey where we build relationships with and foster curiosity around mathematics. I’ve written several posts over the years:
  • Math Rocks: Building an Elementary Community of Practice – These are the slides from my CAMT 2017 session where I shared about how we structure and lead Math Rocks.
  • Year 1 (2015-16 School Year)
    • Go Big or Go Home: Math Rocks Day 1 – This post details the first day of our first Math Rocks cohort from the 2015-16 school year.
    • Go Big or Go Home: Math Rocks Day 2 – This post details the second day of our first Math Rocks cohort from the 2015-16 school year.
    • Better Questions: Math Rocks Meets Open Middle – During our first year of Math Rocks we introduced our teachers to Open Middle problems.
    • 18 Amazing Things – This post shares snippets from our Math Rocks teachers’ final reflections.
  • Year 2 (2016-17 School Year)
    • Math Rocks Redux Part 1 – This post details the first day of our second Math Rocks cohort from the 2016-17 school year.
    • Math Rocks Redux Part 2 – This post details the second day of our second Math Rocks cohort from the 2016-17 school year.
    • Decisions, Decisions – During the second year of Math Rocks, we focused on number talks. This post goes into details about one of our after-school sessions.