At the beginning of the 2021-22 school year, AISC piloted a new set of professional growth standards for teachers that were wider in scope than our current standards. The futures goal as written reads:
AISC develops a professional growth, wellbeing, and evaluation framework that is aligned to best practices and to the vision for an AISC learner, incorporates faculty learning and development.
The goal this year for the pathway is:
Prototype the new Professional Growth handbook with all new teachers and additional volunteers.
This academic year, 25 teachers are continuing to work with the Professional Growth and Excellence standards for the second consecutive year, while our new teachers are focused on three new standards, which are:
- Embraces responsibility
- Communicates
- Embeds Wellbeing
To collect data for the new Professional Growth and Excellence (PG&E) standards, teachers are utilizing various tools such as photographs, data tables, the Seesaw platform, charts, and Google sites.
At the beginning of the year, we convened a meeting to introduce teachers to the new standards, which are accessible through a dedicated Schoology page. Following this, teachers set goals and had initial meetings with their supervisors to determine what evidence they could collect and how they could receive support during the process.
The majority of teachers have already had progress monitoring meetings with their supervisors and have expressed feeling supported throughout the process. Many teachers are making significant headway towards achieving their three goals for the academic year and have been able to seek consultation with their supervisors as needed.
In April, the PG&E working group will convene to discuss the effectiveness of the PG&E evidence form and suggest any necessary improvements to the format. Based on this feedback, refinements will be made to both the form and the PG&E Handbook for teachers.
The final phase of the process is to launch the new PG&E process for the entire faculty. This will begin with a meeting in May and will be followed by another meeting in July for incoming faculty.
Jennifer Bertram, Middle School Principal