Foundation Level III - Direct School and Classroom Support
Level III, Creating Exemplary Cadres, brings the professional development directly to the classrooms through demonstration lessons with actual students and a coaching component to provide critical feedback to selected (8-10) practitioners who become a culturally responsive cadre at the school. When educators receive direct support at schools, consistent and deep implementation of instructional innovations occur. Direct school support comes in three forms – demonstration lessons by experts, coaching with an expert, and lastly establishing a critical friends group (see description in Level II).
Getting Acquainted With The School and Cadre
How culturally responsive are you now? How do you know where you going without knowing where you are? Before starting the path to being culturally responsive, it is important as a school to know where you are in terms of your culturally responsiveness. This half-day provides us the opportunity to do a school-wide pre-assessment and setting CLR goals for the school.
Demonstration Collaborative Day
Expert teachers come to your classrooms and conduct demonstration lessons based on the foundational days 3 and 4. Each demonstration lesson includes a pre-brief meeting, 45-60 minute demo, and debrief meeting. Demonstrations lessons are organized by grade level span (K-1, 2-3, 4-5, and secondary). Teachers are invited to participate by span. Each observing teacher will receive the lesson in hard copy form.
Coaching with Technical Feedback
Coaching teachers through culturally and linguistically responsive lessons with critical feedback after each lesson. Research clearly shows that when teachers receive expert, critical feedback in a supportive manner, they are more likely to implement. In this session, your teachers will be observed teaching culturally responsive lessons by one of our expert coaches and he/she will receive expert feedback on the lesson. The coaching session comes in three parts: collaborative planning (usually done by phone or email), lesson observation, and feedback meeting.
Sustaining The Work
Critical Friends Group, establishing a team or cadre of teachers to sustain the work with collaborative lesson planning and peer coaching is the idea. How do you plan to sustain the work once CCRTL is gone? You are going to do so with a critical friends group, a collaborative group of core teachers who are committed to deeply implementing the approach. This session, which has three components, will train the cadre to be a critical friends group. First component is the lesson plan collaborative. The second component is peer coaching and the last component is examining student work. Each component is a separate day, approximately 2 hours per meeting time. A group leader will have to be selected to work with our consultant through the initial process.
Each of these five sessions is scheduled according to the individual school’s calendar in collaboration with the administrator.