Professional Development Offerings
Professional Development at EDSS is always delivered by a practicing educator in the field. EDSS is made up of educators from all walks of life who know the value of high-quality, relevant professional development. We started EDSS to ensure that all of our pieces of training are of the highest quality and contribute to the field of education. These offerings can be customized for your school or district. Further, we also offer these courses right through EDSS at convenient times throughout the school year over Zoom or in-person. Check out our Professional Development Calendar for our upcoming training schedule.
Professional Development Offerings
Building a 9th Grade Academy
Professional Learning Communities: How to Build Them The Right Way
How To Build Leadership Capacity Within Your Faculty: Wildly Successful Ideas To Incorporate Tomorrow.
Incorporating High Quality Pedagogy: Marzano’s and Hattie’s Research On Instruction
Scheduling: From The Block To Hybrid
New Teacher Mentoring and Evaluation: How to Support Your New Staff
Acceleration Roadmap Training For Administrators
Incorporating Response To Intervention In Your School
Acceleration Roadmap Training for Classroom Educators
Administrator Social Hour
EDSS comprises former administrators who recall the collaboration, fellowship, and connections we made during the 413 Administrator Meetings sponsored by the MSSAA. We aim to bring back these meetings and the value they brought to attendees. As a licensed PDP provider, EDSS would like to invite you to meet up with colleagues, learn more about how EDSS can help you and your staff, and earn PDP’s towards licensure.
Join us at Red Rose on April 26th, 2023, for our first monthly session.
Harnessing Artificial Intelligence: Empowering Educators and Enhancing Student Learning
Technology has become an integral part of the teaching and learning process in today's rapidly evolving educational landscape. Among the most promising technological advancements is Artificial Intelligence (AI), which has the potential to revolutionize education. This professional development series is designed for educators and principals seeking to harness the power of AI as both a resource for teacher planning and a tool to engage students in innovative ways.
Instructor: Katrina Danby
Audience - All level of educator from classroom teacher to administrator.
Offerings: January 3rd, 10th, 17th & 24 - 4:00 - 6:00 pm
Best Practices in Teaching High School Math
Best Practices in Teaching High School Mathematics is a professional development workshop for passionate math teachers led by a passionate math teacher. Teachers will explore research-based methods to address how best to serve the students in their classroom. The workshop will focus on discussions about how best to address interleaving topics in lessons, assigning and checking homework, incorporating writing into mathematics, and assessments.
Instructor: Dana Housey
Audience - secondary mathematics teachers and administrators
SPRING 2023 Offerings
Are They Prepared?
How does your daily interaction with your students influence/impact their college and career success? Have your students made the connection between their academics and their career interests? Do they really know what they want to do after their high school graduation or are there career opportunities that they have not considered for themselves?
This workshop can help you to identify strategies to assist your students with aligning their career interests with their academic success. In this workshop, you will gain insights into:
- identifying resources to strengthen your student's career goal choices and to expose them to opportunities that they may not have considered.
Instructor: Dr. Adrienne Smith
Audience: Classroom Teachers
Budgeting for Student Success: How to use the budget process to improve student outcomes
This course, taught by a current superintendent and former assistant superintendent for finance, will align the budget process with the school and district vision and mission to maximize student outcomes. Dr. Regulbuto won 5 straight Meritorious Budget Awards from MASBO. As a superintendent, Dr. Regulbuto heads a 5 town regional school district. This means she has to get the school budget passed 5 times each year! She is intimately familiar with the budget process and how to make it work for school districts in a time of shrinking resources and increasing mandates. This training will include:
A “big picture” look at the work of building a budget.
A review of different types of budgeting from zero-based budgeting to priority-based budgeting and everything in between
How to use past budget data to inform future budget projections
The use of grants to supplant expenses to maximize the utility of each budget dollar
Building a communication tool to gather budget information while strengthening relationships
How to present the budget decisions to the school community
How to ensure the budget is a living document that is nimble to the needs of school and district
Instructor: Dr. Beth Regulbuto
Audience: school and district administrators
Building the Master Schedule
How do you maximize student learning, make your budget the most efficient it can be, and utilize your faculty in the best manner possible? Build the master schedule correctly, of course. The master schedule controls everything in a school building, from staffing to class size to your budget. The master schedule is the key to laying the foundation for a great school year in your building.
This training session will show how to build the master schedule for your school. Both expert schedulers and novices will take something away from this session. We will cover the basics of scheduling regardless of your scheduling software. We will even discuss the new hybrid models of scheduling brought about by COVID-19 and remote learning!
Goals
Prepare building schedulers to build a master schedule for a school of any size. The focus will be on middle and high school schedules.
MA Educator Evaluation Standards Covered (Role-Specific Indicators for School Counselors)
(Appendix E)
Standard I: A1, D1
Standard 2: B1,B2,D3,E2,E5
Standard 3: B1,B2
Standard 4: D1
Instructor: Dr. Peter Dufresne
Audience: anyone involved with scheduling from administrators, support staff, and clerical staff
Caffeinate Your Climate!
This workshop provides administrators or teachers quick, easy, and headache-free ways to boost your school or classroom culture! Dr. Gillen will give attendees tips, tricks, and general best practices to keep your classroom and even faculty meetings fun, quick-paced, and events that teachers and students will look forward to! All attendees will leave with tangible takeaways that they can instantly implement to build their classrooms or teams and enhance their environment!
Instructor: Dr. Peter Gillen
Audience: school administrators and classroom teachers
Progressive Math Series with Mistie Parsons
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Math Instructional Strategies, 1.0
This session is aimed at designing strategies to ensure that students apply the math practices in classrooms on a regular basis. If you’ve been attempted to teach conceptually, but find yourself reverting back to procedural methods, you aren’t alone! Engage in this session to acquire strategies that ensure students retain both the big ideas and get the practice they need! Focus will be on some key instructional strategies to get students to grapple with concepts and then, apply their learning to solve problems.
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This session is designed for those already committed to teaching conceptually and find themselves wanting to go deeper. Focus will be on strategies to ensure that all students are engaging, all the time. We will consider how to use formative assessments to intentionally plan for advancement of the grade level learning, how to give effective feedback on learning and intentional moves to quickly deepen learning within the class period.
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Getting Students to Talk in Math Classrooms
Know that talk in math is a good idea, but find yourself with a silent classroom more than you’d like? Got students who are talking, but finding yourself having to give them the ideas more than you’d like? This session is for you! We will apply the instructional frameworks of student talk (like turn and talk and fishbowl) and Math/Algebra Talks to get more students talking in class and then, using that talk to further their learning.
Audience: middle and high school mathematics instructors
This series is focused on middle and high school mathematics pedagogy strategies to fully engage your students. Mistie Parsons has been a mathematics instructor and school administrator for many years. She has honed these strategies as a professional development presenter and EDSS is please to bring them to you.
Sign Up Links are below
Supporting All Learners in Math Classrooms
Supporting All Learners in Math Classrooms is appropriate for both learning disabled and learning-appropriate teachers.
Do you find yourself defaulting to giving students procedural steps to follow and then, seeing them consistently miss steps? Research shows us that many students struggle with math because they do not understand the why behind what they are doing and easily forget steps – especially students with special needs. This session will focus on planning for grade-level learning while applying the math practices to allow for multiple methods of entry and success for students.
Instructor: Mistie Parsons
Audience: middle and high school mathematics and special education teachers
Instructional Coaching Series
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What is this coaching thing that’s so popular? This session will introduce those new to coaching to frameworks and strategies for effectively partnering with educators for student success. Emphasis will be on coaching with dignity and designing and executing a coaching conversation.
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Data can be a powerful tool for improvement and also, scary! This session will focus on choosing the right-time data to use for effective coaching, as well as how to use coaching to evaluate coaching success.
This training can be offered as a stand-alone professional development or a customizable service. Mistie can come into your school or district and work with your instructional coaches directly to deliver these pieces of training.
Audience: K - 12 schools and districts
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School leaders are responsible for the outcomes of their school buildings and yet, often find themselves balancing several other responsibilities. This session will discuss how to use global school data to determine school priorities, how to build out strategies to actualize them and how to evaluate progress along the way. This session is designed for school leaders and would also be appropriate for district leaders.
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How many of us have received (or given) feedback that seemed more an opinion than a strategy for improvement? This session will focus on giving right-sized feedback, within a coaching cycle, utilizing the Massachusetts Classroom Rubric as a frame.
Successful School and District Leadership Series
Audience: school and district administrators
The Trauma-Informed Classroom
While schools have always played a vital role in supporting the health and well-being of all children, it has never been more challenging. As a society, we have never been more aware of our students' emotional needs and mental health. This is due to significant increases in our communication around mental health, mainly providing the language to discuss this with students. While the gaps are shrinking, much more consistency is needed in providing trauma-sensitive classrooms and schools. While we have made progress in understanding trauma and its impact on learning, more work remains to be done.
In training, we talk about the science of trauma in the brain and how it manifests in a variety of behaviors ranging from withdrawing, defiance, disruption, and avoidance. Through the course, we will work to understand all the components that affect the child and the school environment. We will work to make your school and classroom a place that promotes independence and resilience.
This training can be broken up into:
1. 4 separate module sessions with follow-up visits to progress monitor
2. A single-day PD for staff
3. A yearlong 5-part series.
John uses case studies and research-based practices to reinforce proven trauma-informed instruction techniques.