COJOWA has been continously improving our induction process for new staff members. The academic portion of induction includes an introduction to school-wide initatives and the programs/policies that support those initiatives, such as Standards Based Grading, 7Mindsets, Positive Discipline, and Project Based Learning. We also provide an overview of our school’s assessment policy, curriculum documents/guides and unit plans, and department specfic program information/training (example Pearson Realize, Eureka Math, Amplify Science, Teacher’s College Readers and Writer’s Workshop). Our Lead Teachers help in this process, alongside Section Principals and Instructional Coaches.

Throughout the year, teachers participate in ongoing professional development (please see the Wednesday PD Calendar for details) on Wednesdays and in grade level team meetings during the week. Our Lead Teachers help to organize and deliver many of these PD sessions. We also have 3 full Professional Development days that are tailored to supporting staff with school-wide initiatives. This year’s PD Days, for example, were focused on developing effective PBL units using the Understanding by Design Unit Plan template by Wiggins and McTighe.

We have two instructional coaches on staff (one for PS/ES and one for MS/HS) who work to support individual teachers and small groups through 4-5 week coaching cycles. These coaching cycles “paused” during the pandemic but are now resuming as we have returned back to campus. Our next steps will include coach-facilitated learning walks in MS/HS, where small groups of teachers will enter into 3-4 classrooms at a time to focus on specific lookfors tailored to one type of instructional strategy or skill (for example, one learning walk might focus primarily on integrating technology, while another learning walk might focus on differentiation). We have begun talking with our lead teachers to develop a learning walk "look for" tool, based on the ELEOT. We have also identified learning walk groups that have common planning periods and are looking forward to scheduling our "Learning Walk Launch" in the coming months.