January 2018

Greetings From the Executive Director...

Happy New Year! I hope you had a restful and rejuvenating Winter Break. January is a time for resolutions and resetting, and in that spirit I want to take a moment to share with you some of the changes that are happening at our Professional Instructional Center (PIC).

What is PIC?

The Professional Instructional Center (PIC) serves students with special needs in Minneapolis Public Schools by providing instructional materials, professional development training for teachers and other resources to special education teachers in Minneapolis Public Schools.

Vision

All students can achieve at higher levels of literacy.

Mission

Our mission is to support teaching staff by actively disseminating research-based best practice information, curriculum and teaching strategies through materials availability, staff development and teacher demonstration.

Upcoming changes to PIC

As we developed the department budget for this year, we made the decision to invest time and money to update PIC. This is in alignment with the Superintendent’s priorities and our Department Goals.

Key Outcomes for the 2017-2018 school year

  1. Clean out outdated materials
    • Throughout the years, PIC has acquired outdated materials that are not in alignment with current state standards and best practices; and as a result, we are in the process of reviewing and removing those materials
  2. Provide greater access to all materials for all special education staff
    • In the past, PIC was divided up by disability areas, moving forward teachers will be able to access materials for DCD, SLD, EBD, and ASD students based on a student’s need and not a specific disability area. We will continue to limit access to materials that are specific to our related staff specialty (SLP, DAPE, OT, Psych., etc)
  3. Alignment of specialized reading interventions with the new PreK-5 Literacy curriculum
    • We are working closely with our teaching and learning colleagues to ensure that our intervention materials are supporting out PreK-5 Literacy curriculum
  4. Introducing a new reading intervention materials at two schools
    • We are currently exploring an Orton-Gillingham based program that is both web-based and teacher led and are implementing this intervention at two of our schools.

I would like to thank Amy Johnson, Director of Special Education, for her leadership in rejuvenating PIC. She and the PIC team, Tracy Murphy and Kathy Peterson, have worked extremely hard to update materials, in addition to researching and updating evidence based materials that special education staff can access for their students.

I also want to put a plug in for our Resources for Increasing Student Achievement Web Tool (RISA), which is a mini virtual PIC created for your convenience. I hope you find some time this new year to check out the resources at PIC.

Rochelle Cox

Executive Director of Special Education and Health Services