Busy Professional Development Day in SDOC

Students in the School District of Oconee County did not attend school on Monday, allowing teachers a professional development day. It was a busy day for teachers despite not having students in the classrooms, explains Oconee County Schools Assistant Superintendent of Instruction Ginger Hopkins. “Staff worked on a number of strategic initiatives, all geared toward helping our students learn and be college and career ready. Among those things are things like working on our writing initiatives that we recently adopted. This is a big deal as we look at our assessment scores; we need to continue to focus in this area. We also worked on STEM initiatives those are science, technology, engineering and math. We are looking at project based learning activities to move that kind of thing forward. We’ve also recently adopted a learning content management system, which we have used to create common syllabi across the district and to create communities of practice. A number of initiatives around special education students, our limited English proficient students and even our gifted and talented students. Our music teachers, for instance, are working on their curriculums.” Professional development days are rare for teachers, continues Hopkins. “We get very few of these opportunities actually, when you think about other industries and how easy it is for folks to continue their development. So, these are the days that our teachers get during the school year to work together, to have folks come in and work with them to continue to improve their craft, their trade. It is important and sometimes we bring people in from the outside, consultants to work with them, sometimes we find the best practices that are going on within the district and we use those to train each other, but it is a time of learning for staff. If staff are not learning and doing continuous improvement than our students will not have the benefit of continuous improvement. So, these are real important days for us and we use every minute of them.” The School District of Oconee County has another professional development day for teachers planned for Monday, Oct. 26.