HOISINGTON — Steaming ahead into the 21st century, USD 431 School District will begin implementing online professional development inservices for teachers. In past years, districts have had to pull teachers from the classroom.
“We can assign different subjects instead of taking teachers out of the classroom and hiring a substitute,” said Bill Lowry, superintendent of USD 431. However, “we will not completely eliminate other types of professional development.”
He gave an example of annual blood pathogen procedures retraining. The procedures can be view online on-demand in a few minutes instead of taking an hour of the educators’ time.
In addition, travel time to other seminars is reduced.
The Educator Effectiveness System, which will be used by the district, is a multi-tiered approach to increasing classroom efficiency. Professional development as well as theory and application, and observation and evaluation are included.
“It covers the whole realm of having effective educators,” said Lowry. “The process is to improve educators.”
If an issue comes up during evaluation, the teacher can be assigned a subject to view “some of the best teachers in the nation,” on that particular subject, said Lowry. Afterwards, they answer reflection questions.
The videos show leading researchers best instruction and how it looks in the classroom, said Lowry.
Teachers can collaborate with teachers of the same grade level from across the nation since every district in the nation is on the same standards.
“There is so much to it,” said Lowry at a recent school board meeting. “It is so powerful.”
Professional development subjects include anything from homework assignments, building problem solving skills, successful readers, Common Core, cyberbullying and many teaching techniques.
“You have to be committed to utilizing it and making it beneficial,” said Lowry. The district will spend this semester getting prepared and held training over the Christmas break.