professional development

CUSTOMIZED TRAINING INCLUDING ANY OF THE TEN DOMAINS OF EDUCATOR PRACTICE:

TIER 1

Relationships: Educator self-knowledge, self-care and frames of mind

Educators reflect on their professional philosophies, personalities, styles, preferences, and tendencies, looking for current strengths and needs, and create professional goals based on these explorations. 13 keys to educator wellness/self-preservation/are examined, and professional self-care goals are set.

Relationships: Educator to student, colleagues and families

Eight characteristics of social competency are explored through the lens of educator relationships; dozens of specific classroom and school-wide implications are discussed. The goal: improving educator relational connectivity and use of “withitness” with all members of the school community.

Relationships: Student-to-Student

PSCC offers many community-building structures that deepen relationships among students. Designed for use in Advisory, homerooms, or throughout each day, activities are grouped by types: Meet and Greets, “Mixers,” All-Class Socializers, All-Class Discussions, Games, “In the margins and all-day-long,” Accolades, Mindfulness exercises, and Small-Group Socializers.

Social-emotional Learning (SEL)

Learn to help students explore the emotional realm of student life. Emphasis is on identifying and managing emotions. Select a set of social-emotional learning targets, decide when/how to teach/practice each skill/trait/value, and plan when to integrate SEL throughout the day. Particular emphasis is placed on teaching and practicing self-regulation.

Setting Expectations

Highly recommended for summer trainings, as the bulk of this work occurs in the first month of the school year. Explore methods of creating sets of classroom and schoolwide guidelines. Assess several durable, practical, evidence-based methods of setting expectations, identifying those that best fit your student’s needs, Also, language to use with students as expectations are set.

Transferring Responsibilities to Students

Learn to stay ahead of the behavior game. PSCC lays out how to gradually release to students the responsibility for any classroom routine, learning event or transition. Included: 14 pieces of proactive information to consider sharing with students; three approaches to providing positive feedback; a format for gradually releasing the responsibility of any expectation to students over time, and an-easy-to-use reflective learning cycle that helps bring it all together for students. 

In-class Redirects

Each student is unique. To manage the diverse personalities and needs of our students, PSCC offers a simple, differentiated system of reactive behavior management. Educators explore 25 redirect techniques and choose a subset that fits their student population. Clear instructions for introducing and using redirects are also provided. Also included: 4 restorative practices.

Lesson “Playbook”

Explore several simple approaches to lesson/class hour design. Sometimes varying the delivery of content (and how it is applied) to meet different circumstances is the best move to make.

 TIER 2

38 Supports: Basics, circling back to Tier 1, advanced

In every school, a percentage of students will lose their way, cause disruptions for others, and take up most of our time and energy unless we have a variety of additional supports at our fingertips. PSCC contains 36 Tier 2 interventions and offers a systematic way of exploring/implementing.  

 Tier 2 systems and roles

To make sure students receive early and effective Tier 2 support, PSCC helps staff implement a systematic approach to Tier 2; one with defined roles and multiple layers of redundancy to help make sure no student is overlooked.

 OUTCOMES:

Unified staff

Training sessions frame PSCC practices in ways that unify the entire adult community. Staff are pointed towards broad schoolwide goals, then select structures from several options to meet goals, choosing only those practices that align best with their students’ needs. Staff buy-in is high: teachers “own” (and are more responsible for) the systems they create.

 Healthy students  

Each PSCC Domain of Practice contains strategies that help students grow their social-emotional and academic capacities. Students learn important internal competencies such as self-regulation, empathy, moral sense/fairness and reasoning, and vital social competencies such as staying in synch with a group, assertion, and taking actions to assist self/others. The result: student buy-in is high; students own (and are more responsible for) their academic and social behavior. Additionally, each domain contains trauma-sensitive practices, which may be used situationally.

 Relevant school experiences for all students  

Each staff trained in PSCC learns to prioritize academic, social-emotional, and cultural relevance for students. Additionally, because PSCC helps bring schools closer to meeting student needs for relatedness (see domains 1-3), competence (see domains 4-8), and learns to seek student input/agency throughout each school day, students feel more connected to school, learn key competencies, and take more ownership of learning. In short, PSCC helps schools meet student needs

 Practice Profiles guide Teacher Implementation   

PSCC is informed by Implementation Science. To help school communities assess how the initiative is progressing, PSCC provides Practice Profiles for each Domain of Practice. These can be used by teachers to assess their own implementation, by teaching teams during peer classroom visits, and or by administrators during classroom observations.

CONSULTING

On-site staff and administrative technical support:

Needs Assessments: walk-throughs, diagnostic and prescriptive services

Classroom coaching

Classroom demonstrations

Staff/team meetings

Organizing peer to peer classroom visits

Customized practice profiles/checklists

Discipline policy, assessment and alignment