"I had the pleasure of working with Sheila for the past year. Her ability to connect to staff members and adapt her trainings to meet staff members where they are instructionally has been the best job-embedded professional development they could have received. Sheila used her interactions within the district to recommend next steps and guide us in implementing best instructional practices."
Dr. Sean R. McCarron
School Business Administrator Director of Curriculum & InstructionRunnemede School District
Professional Learning Possibilities
Professional learning with Sheila is collaborative, interactive, and engaging. As literacy and learning are dialogic, language is always used as a tool in service of meaning-making. Decisions about learning and teaching based on research are brought to life, from supporting teachers to examine their beliefs about learning to crafting lessons for whole and small-group instruction. Sheila supports bringing the theoretical to lessons.
Sheila works with schools and districts to craft professional learning plans that make sense for the teaching staff, building on the professional learning experiences that have already occurred. This work involves classroom teachers and those in leadership positions—administrators, coaches, and teacher leaders.
Workshops
These experiences bring the teachers, coaches, and principals out of the classroom to study literacy practices and explore the knowledge base that underlies these practices. If these sessions are on-site, we may co-plan and observe lesson demonstrations with students. If we don’t have access to work with children, we use lessons on video to study practice. In either setting, the teaching decisions that were made before, during, and after the lesson, the reasons why they were made, and the next steps based on the student learning become explicit.
Studying practice together:
In these sessions, we learn as a community, collaboratively engaging in conversations that construct the process of planning a lesson and the decisions made along the way. Careful attention to teacher language choice nurtures the students towards literacy independence and agency. Considerations
from text choice and lesson introduction to determining the best
place to pause for student collaboration is discussed. After planning,
Sheila or the teachers may teach the lesson so others can observe
the lesson we co-planned to see if our decisions led to student success.
This is followed by debriefing the lesson and the planning process.
Coaching:
Being invited to coach speaks to trust and commitment. While not the beginning of professional development, it often becomes part of the professional learning experiences for Sheila and those she supports. This experience offers educators the opportunity to further understand themselves as intentional and meaningful practitioners alongside a nurturing collaborator.