Derek L. McCoy

   I‘m proud of the creativity my administrative team has demonstrated with devising and implementing game changing strategies that will go a long way in supporting the teaching and learning in our school. I have a great core group of educators who care about our school and community – its exciting to see how their energy matches their creativity.

One strategy that we have been developing is our Instructional Support Days. Our ISDs are days the administrators and/or coaches lead pd on different topics identified as needs for our school. We use several resources to gather information and determine what our pd needs are: informal walk thru data, information capture activities at the end of collaborative planning, even conversations we have with teachers. We then get together to determine the schedule of training/sharing and who will deliver.

There is a great deal of flexibility in our ISDs. We don’t always have each coach facilitating a session and the topics vary a great deal. For example, we had coaches leading sessions on word walls and a specific instructional best practice. The next ISD, all three tag-teamed an online pd session on formative assessments.

We are leaving this as an open forum for training. In a couple of weeks, I plan on leading a session on building up a PLN. We have had a teacher lead a share session on WebQuests. This was exciting to see because as we planned this, we realized this was an opportunity to empower our teachers and give them an opportunity to show some internal leadership and we can build our own training efficacy.

 I‘m looking forward to seeing this develop. This is one strategy that, as it continues to develop, will pay off exponentially!