School was out for summer, but the learning continued for teachers across the Binghamton City School District! A rich variety of professional development opportunities were offered to both new employees (we added nearly 60 new members to our instructional team this summer!) and veteran teachers. Our summer professional development offerings were specifically tailored to reflect the district's three major commitments for the upcoming school year.
The first is to continue to build the capacity, collaboration, and consistency across buildings with Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). PLCs are learning communities where it is standard practice to ask the question, “How do we know?” It is a process where educators are actively engaged in rethinking the teaching and learning that takes place in their classrooms, walking away with an improved approach.
The second district commitment is to extend and enhance culturally and linguistically responsive (CLR) teaching and learning throughout the district. CLR is the practice of validating and affirming the home cultures and home languages of all of our students for the purpose of building upon those cultures to bridge students to success in the culture of school and mainstream society. In the BCSD, we believe that all administrators, teachers, and staff need to meet the students where they are to help get them to where they need to be.
Finally, the third district commitment is to implement Response to Intervention with fidelity across all buildings and deliver targeted interventions to students most impacted by the loss of learning time. Response to Intervention (RTI) is a form of process accountability. It provides an opportunity for practitioners to explain what we are doing when we are doing it. People tend to think deeper when engaged in a process. The aim of this process is to discover a better solution to a student's lack of progress, whether it is evident from a positive outcome or careful evaluation of a negative one.
We had 141 different professional learning opportunities this summer between Monday, June 28, and Friday, Sept. 3. Overall, we had 1,678 participants in those opportunities.
We also had more than 200 students across our five summer enrichment sites – K-5 students at Mann, Franklin, and MacArthur, and 6-8 students at East and West. Finally, we had more than 100 BHS students participate in fully remote credit recovery with teachers this summer. We look forward to continuing working toward implementing these commitments in our classrooms this school year, as we work to help every student achieve the best possible academic outcome.