Do you ever wonder how we spend our Professional Development Days? Curious about what we talk about and what differences you can expect as our teachers return to the classrooms?
Here is your inside look at our Professional Development Day:
This past Monday, February 20th, every teacher at Yellow Brick Road came together with the schools in their states to grow as a team, learn more about the YBR Way, and learn new skills to benefit the students in their classrooms!
We also unveiled our new mission; “To put good people into the world, and leave it better than we found it!”. While that could be a whole blog post on its own, and likely will be in the near future, we want to point a few things out! The goal inside of our schools has not changed with this new mission. Our goals have always revolved around serving our students and teachers equally to ensure that we are putting good humans into the world on all fronts. The last half of our new mission is to “leave it better than we found it.”. That could mean the schools, our towns, our policies, our teachers’ career paths, or our parents’ individualized needs. That second portion of our mission holds so much potential and intention for us to make the world a better place. We want to enhance every environment that we are a part of! Everything that we discussed at Professional Development Day was centered around the foundation of our new mission and our long-standing core values.
All of that being said; Professional Development Day is the perfect way for us to share new opportunities with our teachers and discuss new policies and procedures. We spent the morning in Minnesota discussing partnerships that we have made with local colleges to give our teachers discounted tuition when they enroll in their programs. Many of our teachers come to us looking for professional development and we are answering their requests through these partnerships!
Next, we led our new schools in Iowa through the Yellow Brick Road onboarding process. While we began training everyone the YBR Way when we first came into our new schools, we used Monday to thoroughly explain who we are and what we do at Yellow Brick Road. This gave all of our new teachers a chance to understand our vision and mission!
In Nebraska, our teachers went through the Early Learning Guidelines. This is a required training for all preschool teachers in Nebraska that covers different subjects, teaching methods, social and emotional tools, and developmental goals for our students! Our teachers were able to walk away with tools to use in their classrooms starting on Tuesday.
In Minnesota, we had a trainer named Jen Rothmeyer who discussed “Prevention & Behavior” in regard to the environments of our classrooms. She gave our teachers invaluable resources for classroom management based on how our classrooms are set up and run with the individuals in our classrooms!
In all of our schools, we had a Zoom training with Leadership Coach, Tom Wood. Tom discussed leadership and “leading yourself” with our teachers. As a part of our #YBRHealthyHeart challenge, we were excited to invite Tom to speak to all of our teachers to give them tools and resources to help them lead their lives in ways that are helpful for not just them but everyone they encounter and support.
This may feel like a long-winded blog post for just one day of development training, discussions, and activities. All of this was to say that our teachers worked hard, played hard, and learned a lot on Monday! Every piece of our day truly came back to our mission of “putting good humans into the world, and leaving it better than we found it.”. Every training, activity, and discussion was led with that goal in mind.
Check out this incredible video of our Minnesota team hard at work during their Professional Development Day!