Mineral Wells ISD Staff Development
To ensure that educators continuously grow in an effort to increase student achievement is the goal of staff development in our District. Our staff development plan includes three types of efforts:
- Individual Level- Each teacher should be engaged in improving his own skills in his academic content. This should be documented in the Teacher Self-Evaluation.
- School Level- The school faculty will work collaboratively to refine or renovate some aspect of their school program. The focus should be based on their needs assessment and their assessment results.
- District Level- District-wide initiatives will be utilized to meet established goals and objectives.
As a district focus for the next three years, we will be investing in training staff in the following approaches and programs:
Thinking Maps
The main purpose of this training is to use Thinking Maps as a common visual language in the learning community for transferring thinking processes, integrating learning, and for continuously assessing progress. The program includes eight thinking maps and works to link thinking maps to questioning and student thinking.
Write... from the Beginning and Write... to the Future
Designed for schools trained in Thinking Maps, Write... from the Beginning is a developmental writing program focused on early childhood training in those criteria that are necessary for successful writing achievement beyond the primary years.
Write... for the Future is a secondary school-wide writing program that focuses on using Thinking Maps to support reading comprehension/response to literature, biographical/autobiographical narrative, expository writing, and persuasive writing. In addition, the program specifically addresses writing prompts for the SAT and TAKS as well as open-ended response questions.
A Framework for Understanding Poverty
This training is based upon the work of Ruby Payne and should serve as guide in helping us to work with children and parents. The basic premise is that each individual brings with him the hidden rules of the class in which he was raised. Most of our schools and businesses operate from middle class norms. For our students to be successful, we must understand their hidden rules and teach the rules that will make them successful at school and at work.
Classroom Instruction that Works
Robert Marzano, Debra J. Pickering, and Jane E. Polluck have examined an abundance of educational research to identify nine instructional strategies that have positive effects on student learning: identifying similarities and differences; summarizing and note taking; reinforcing effort and providing recognition; homework and practice; nonlinguistic representations; cooperative learning; setting objectives and providing feedback; generating and testing hypotheses; and questions, cues, and advance organizers.
