Professional Development

All professional development documents and faculty meeting agendas and slideshows

are linked in the DMS Staff Map it Out Canvas Course

Profile of a Teacher and Leader at Durham Dragon

Embrace the Mandate for Change:

Understand your role in the discipline cycle and how it impacts instruction:

  • Power struggles are counterproductive -- try something else.

  • Talk to your students and understand they are not a single story

  • Work with compassion, but high expectations

  • Keep them in class

Change the culture of our hallways and our classrooms:

  • Be in the hallways and not at your desk.

  • Greet students by name… spread some joy. :)

Raise our expectations for ourselves and our students:

  • Save our instructional time!!

  • Use restorative practices to build relationships. The day will be more enjoyable.

Enjoy and embrace every opportunity.

  • Love our students…. And they are all our students.

  • We may be their main source of something positive each day.

Analysis of Instructional Actions

Educational researcher John Hattie, who wrote Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning, states one of his goals is to aid teachers in seeing and better understanding learning through the eyes of their students.

Hattie has spent more than 15 years researching the influences on achievement of K-12 children. His findings linked student outcomes to several highly effective classroom practices. Here are five key practices:

1. Teacher Clarity

When a teacher begins a new unit of study or project with students, she clarifies the purpose and learning goals, and provides explicit criteria on how students can be successful. It's ideal to also present models or examples to students so they can see what the end product looks like.

2. Classroom Discussion

Teachers need to frequently step offstage and facilitate entire class discussion. This allows students to learn from each other. It's also a great opportunity for teachers to formatively assess (through observation) how well students are grasping new content and concepts.

3. Feedback

How do learners know they are moving forward without steady, consistent feedback? They often won't. Along with individual feedback (written or verbal), teachers need to provide whole-group feedback on patterns they see in the collective class' growth and areas of need. Students also need to be given opportunities to provide feedback to the teacher so that she can adjust the learning process, materials, and instruction accordingly.

4. Formative Assessments

In order to provide students with effective and accurate feedback, teachers need to assess frequently and routinely where students are in relation to the unit of study's learning goals or end product (summative assessment). Hattie recommends that teachers spend the same amount of time on formative evaluation as they do on summative assessment.

5. Metacognitive Strategies

Students are given opportunities to plan and organize, monitor their own work, direct their own learning, and to self-reflect along the way. When we provide students with time and space to be aware of their own knowledge and their own thinking, student ownership increases. And research shows that metacognition can be taught.