Heading north to Vermont for today's #100DistrictConverations post, with Amy Minor, Superintendent of Colchester School District. I love how well Amy knows the history and evolution of her district's professional learning practices and strategies as the former high school principal in her district. Thank you Megan Benay for making conversation #17 possible!

"I'm incredibly proud of the work we're doing to empower students and foster continuous learning with our educators. We have spent 10 years as a leadership team and faculty talking about teaching practices, defining assessment, and building competency rubrics, which have led to incredible frameworks that guide our district. However, like any framework or best practice, we must continue to check in with how implementation is going and make sure that we are bringing along our newest teachers and leaders in the process.

Our district leadership team supports school teams to engage deeply in the analysis of data, which includes both interim STAR data as well as proficiency-based data, which is called out in the new Vermont Agency of Education framework for continuous improvement. We support our admin teams by providing readily compiled data sets and charts through our 'Your Data' initiative. We believe that in order to effectively utilize professional learning with teachers, building leadership teams and PD committees must thoroughly review and understand their data, becoming intimately familiar with their building's performance. Only then can PD committees responsibly plan for faculty meetings and school-based professional learning for the year.

After reviewing 'Your Data', our professional learning teams then establish specific, measurable goals in three key areas: math, ELA, and school culture, with a strong focus on closing the achievement gap for marginalized student groups. Building leaders then determine the high-leverage strategies they will implement across the building to achieve these goals.

We are committed to empowering our building-level PD committees to collaboratively leverage the expertise within their own schools. This approach empowers internal educational experts and recognizes the district's current investment in local resources. Our district has found that relying solely on external consultants for this work does not always yield the desired results.

While we prefer an organic, internally driven approach, we do have strong partnerships with facilitators from the University of Vermont, UP for Learning, and our local rotary club. We have brought in outside experts in the past to support initial training and then thoughtfully integrated our new knowledge, like trauma-informed practices, into our MTSS framework as a universal Tier 1 support. Our Collaborative Work Groups allow teachers to explore specific goals, gather feedback, & share learning, creating a culture of shared expertise."