A Few Key Ideas

A few key ides from this week’s artifact are as follows.  Standards are an essential component of the professional development structure.  They delineate specific characteristics of essential categories of professional learning.  Each of the qualities described in these subsets contribute to efficacious teaching practices, supportive leadership, and improved results for all students (Learning Forward, 2011).  These benchmark exemplars are further refined into components and levels of achievement.  Correlating rubrics are created to further illustrate specific qualities inherent in the components.  They detail criteria that must be met in order to indicate proficiency at a particular level.

Secondly, professional learning standards, as well as the innovative configuration maps will enable educators to utilize uniform benchmarks that are described in abstract terms as well as how they should look when actuated in the classroom. 

Lastly, since the overarching goal of any PD undertaking is to increase student learning the use of student-generated data must be seen as foundational.  Data is one of Learning Forwards more prominent standards.   Properly using data will take schools from a modality that emphasizes a generalized, template-restricted practice of teaching to a culture that collects, analyzes, and celebrates authentic evidence. This authentic information will describe in real terms how students perform in our classrooms.  Resultantly, we can use this knowledge to create individualized lesson plans that tap into the interests and learning preferences of our students.

References

Learning Forward. (2011). Learning Forward Crosswalk with Previous Standards.  Retrieved from: http://learningforward.org/.