On Monday our teachers met virtually for our Professional Development Day. Our teachers were all safely in their own classrooms zooming with the whole of #TeamYBR! We brought in a professional trainer to discuss language development. Our teachers were guided through a training regarding classroom management based on our Core Values. Before our teachers were dismissed for the second half of the day to do some spring cleaning in their classrooms, we worked on a thorough curriculum training.
We first want to thank all of our families for allowing these days full of development and growth to be possible for our teachers! We are so appreciative of the collaborative community that we have inside of each of our schools between our parents, teachers, and leaders.
If you are reading this blog post then you are probably aware that collaboration is one of our core values. Collaboration is just one of the core values that we talked about on Monday when we discussed classroom management. In a classroom, our teachers must work collaboratively with strong communication skills between their co-teachers and students to create a nurturing environment. By creating a nurturing environment, and implimenting innovative ideas and techniques, our teachers are able to create fun and positive memories with our students. Our CEO, Jessica Johnsen, was able to elaborate on how our six corevalues drive our classroom cultures!
In the next portion of our development day our teachers discussed our curriculum. We went over expectations, best practices, and ways to identify interests for topics in the classroom. Our curriculum is entirely interest based focused on our students’ interests in the classrooms. Our teachers are never given a list of topics to teach about, they decide what to focus on when they identify their students’ interest. We have an exceptional curriculum tool called Funny Daffer. Teachers can turn to Funny Daffer and find age-appropriate and play-based activities that are academically driven based on their current topic. Our teachers asked common questions and collaborated about Funny Daffer as a whole team during the training on Monday!
Our professional development days are invaluable because our teachers come away from them with new goals, ideas, and excitement for the future of their students and classrooms! The energy in our schools this week has been full of excitement and wonder as our teachers bring all of their new and innovative ideas to life!