A Commitment to Faculty Learning – December Update

Dec 11, 2019 | All School, Design Thinking, Humanities, Impact, Innovation, Inquiry, Multiplier, PBL/IBL

This morning Mount Vernon faculty and staff participated in the final RDI (Research, Design, and Iteration) professional learning morning of 2019, where all of our faculty and staff collided across divisions and disciplines for deep learning around topics such as curriculum, assessment practices, teaching methodologies, interdisciplinary strategies, and neuroscience.Β 

Our student learners are the immediate beneficiaries of our commitment to faculty learning and innovative practice, and we greatly appreciate your continued partnership so that we can provide key moments for professional growth. 

Each group’s learning experience today is summarized below:

Assessment Sophistication
Teachers conducted a self-reflection of their assessment sophistication and developed an action plan to focus on those areas requiring more attention.

Courageous Conversations
This group refined their small group prototypes and first iterations to provide tools and resources to share with the broader faculty through a gallery walk activity to observe and receive feedback.

Differentiated Instruction and Support
Every group member demonstrated their learning, highlighting respective implementation of differentiated instruction in their content area and classroom, including use of technology as a tool for differentiation that promotes deeper learning for students. They will close the year with a Flash Forward retrieval practice activity, linking Mind, Brain, Education Science with differentiation, a best practice to facilitate information moving from short to long-term memory.

IBL: Humanities Focus
Together with the IBL: STEAM crew, this group took a deeper dive into elements of a learning exhibition, asking teachers to put on a mini-exhibition of their own learning and project work so far this year. We are excited to celebrate all of the IBL projects of the STEAM and Humanities groups this year – over 40 displays. 

IBL: STEAM Focus
This group created and shared an exhibition of teacher learning. In between sessions teachers focused on doing a project themselves before assigning to students. This β€œpop up” will bring together great learning experiences, while improving skill in exhibiting learning and being practitioners of our own work. (Partnering with IBL Humanities for this session).

Mind, Brain, and Education Science
Participants discussed key takeaways from the last session round table discussion with MBE experts: Dr. Marise Parent, Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology, Shelbi Kuhlmann – a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Georgia and Dr. Corbin Feroleto – Clinical Neuropsychologist and owner of The Atlanta Psychology Group.  They identified trends (diet, sleep, stress, exercise connections, memory, executive function, motivation, homework) to research further and to share with peers. 

Preschool
As a celebration of learning and an exercise in reflective practice, Preschool and Early Preschool teachers teamed up to highlight an area of growth for the first semester and provide feedback to their partner team. 

They collected feedback on the piloted Instructional Round documentation system being used in conjunction with teacher research projects in order to iterate the forms as necessary. Teachers presented and discussed IBL strategies to elicit further planning and discussion about best practices. 

Professional Learning and Growth Plan
The Professional Learning and Growth RDI team focused on exploring the competencies that will best empower the MV faculty to continue to offer excellent instruction, to grow in expertise in the complexity of teaching, and to reach for the aspirations communicated in MVx. On December 11, the Professional Learning and Growth RDI team will continue to integrate the Charlotte Danielson Framework for Teaching into the tools and resources that faculty have in order to reflect on practice.

Storybrand
Admissions, Community Development, and Brand Development how new families move through our engagement process and how current families continue to learn, serve, and give to our community. Specifically, we will be looking at the robust data that the teams have been tracking during the first semester. During this time we determined how this data is crucial to understand how families interact and receive our brand experience.

Upcoming Late Start Dates:
January 29, 2020
March 25, 2020
April 29, 2020