Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Professional Development


Today the staff of the Burlington Integrated Preschool spent the day with consultants from HILL Literacy. We have had the pleasure of having Dr. Linda Camp and Etta Rosen support us as we have implemented our new curriculum, Opening the World to Learning (OWL). Today we worked on assessment and how we meet the needs of the diverse group of learners that we work with in the integrated preschool. We spent much of the morning reviewing data that has been collected on each individual child and aligned their needs with early literacy rubrics. This work will help support the teachers when figuring out groupings for instruction. We examined how we are introducing new concepts and teaching students to ensure we are optimizing all opportunities for language and literacy development.

In the afternoon we reviewed the different types of assessment tools we use and fine tuned them so that they were also connected to the OWL curriculum. We will begin working on revamping our progress reports as well as our portfolio assessments. One of our short term goals is that we are able to complete the revamping of progress reports for the end of the year. Portfolio collection will change tomorrow and teacher's will be collecting some standardized things to show growth over a period of time. We will also use portfolios to share individual growth in all developmental domains. Portfolios may have a photograph of your child using beginning writing skills in the dramatic play area, or a picture of a fantastic structure they have spent a lot of time creating. We will also find a way to document social growth and development in order to do this we might video tape your child socially interacting with peers. As a team we concluded that these type of assessments will be more meaningful than if your child could complete a pattern several times through out the year.
The day was very successful and as a team we are working hard to ensure the needs of all learners are being met.

We would like to thank the Fox Hill School for providing us with a home for the day.