Professional Learning

Professional Learning: Instructional Support and Guidance

By Angela Garrett, PAGE Professional Learning

Since mid-March, what we as a nation consider “normal” has been challenged. Within this most unusual time, your home life, school life and social interactions have been limited. Spikes in coronavirus cases across Georgia are making it more difficult to plan for school openings. Each of the PAGE Professional Learning staff are former educators and administrators who understand that you are navigating new territory for the foreseeable future. We are here to support you on that journey.

Just as you are learning and adapting to new methods for teaching your students, over the past few months PAGE Professional Learning embraced the challenge of reviewing how we deliver and facilitate the content of our initiatives. This year, due to potential restrictions with travel and in-person gatherings from COVID-19, our learning cohorts will meet online with followup in virtual discussions and coaching, whenever in-person is not deemed safe.

Our primary purpose as the PAGE Professional Learning department is to design and provide learning experiences that bring you the most effective, student-focused knowledge and skills. We want to support you as you tackle lessons online, and eventually, in-person. Learning is life-long. Whether you’re a first-year newbie or a seasoned veteran, you strive to increase and enhance your skills. PAGE Professional Learning wants to make it possible for you to acquire knowledge that will enhance your mental model for school and learning in a positive, engaging environment.

PAGE Engage Academy, our latest professional learning program, enters its second year. These successful academies meet in the northern, middle, and southern regions of the state. Eight cohorts continue in their final second year. Four

new cohorts start this fall. Meeting four times a year, the Engage Academies resonate with educators because they learn more about unpacking a standard to effectively teach the content, as well as acquire new skills of webbing a unit and creating a lesson using Design Qualities to enhance the lesson. All learning is immediately applicable in the classroom.

As participants experience the lessons in the Engage Academy, teachers begin to purposefully focus on the needs and motives that their students bring to class each day. This is not to say teachers don’t already do many of these things, but this process offers a direction and purpose based on foundational principles of why we teach and how best to do it. Our participants this past year were excited to learn new ways of looking at standards — especially when including the knowledge of “how” their students learn.

Another addition this fall will be the PAGE Transformational Principal’s Institute. This is for principals at all levels and will offer participants a blueprint for becoming the instructional leader that they desire to be. Topics include: • Embracing Change through the School’s Mission and Beliefs; • Legal and Legislative Implications for School Leadership; • School Culture and Why it Matters; • Leadership and the PLC (with Kenneth Williams); • Building a Guiding Coalition, Leading vs. Managing; • Designing a School Learning Experience.

PAGE Professional Learning supports you in all of your school-related, instructional, and leadership roles. We listen to our participants and adjust frequently to offer the best, most relevant learning possible so that you can apply it quickly, with guidance and coaching as needed.

For information on any of our cohort offerings, please contact Angela Garrett at agarrett@pageinc.org or 706-459-0302. n