Professional Learning and Growth
Differentiated, ongoing support for educator effectiveness, based on evidence of educator practice and student learning including individualized support for new and early career educators to advance their professional practice and improve their ability to produce positive student outcomes
New York State Professional Development Standards
New York State’s Professional Development Standards provide a blueprint for high-quality professional development for all educators to improve instruction and student achievement. These standards promote and sustain continuous development, growth, and examination of practice. They also provide clearly defined expectations and commitment to change. They are aligned with New York State Learning Standards and are based on an analysis and adaptation of the National Staff Development Council’s Standards for Staff Development as well as other national, state, and professional standards. The New York State Professional Development Standards are based on fundamental knowledge about contextual factors from converging research about effective professional development and its ultimate impact on student learning.
Professional Learning Standards
This document gives participants and providers a framework for professional learning. New York State’s Professional Learning Standards are based on an analysis and adaptation of the New York State Professional Development Standards (2009), Learning Forward Standards, as well as other national, state, and professional standards. The standards reference the importance of all stakeholders, including P-12 staff, parents, social workers, counselors, community members, teacher educators, higher education representatives and students.
Professional Learning Plan Guidance Document
This guidance document was developed by the New York State Professional Standards and Practices Board to assist schools, school districts and BOCES in the design and writing of their Professional Learning Plans. The document is formatted to highlight the required components of Professional Learning Plans and includes suggested items that might be included to ensure you are meeting the requirements of the plan.
Culturally Responsive In-Person Observation Guide
This unique classroom walkthrough tool from Leadership Academy is designed to support school leaders in creating culturally responsive schools that are intentionally built to ensure children of every race, ethnicity, language, and other identity characteristics have what they need to achieve academic, social, and emotional success.
Next Generation Standards Supporting All Students Conferences Professional Development Toolkits
The Professional Development Turnkey Toolkits provide prepackaged instructional steps and guidelines so educators and administrators may facilitate training on various aspects of the Next Generation Learning Standards within their own professional communities.
REL's Evaluating Professional Learning: A Tool for Schools and Districts
This tool introduces practitioners involved in the management of professional learning at the school, district, regional, or state level to key concepts of professional learning evaluation. It guides users through a process for developing an evaluation plan and includes activities, tools, and other resources for monitoring professional learning initiatives. A multidisciplinary team that includes teacher leaders, professional learning managers, data managers, and other administrators can use this tool to develop a logic model, develop evaluation questions, use existing and new data to address those questions and make sense of the data.
State Growth Measures Toolkits
Resources for teachers, administrators, parents and general public, and professional developers and technical users have been developed to support the interpretation and use of New York State-provided growth scores starting with the 2018-19 school year. In each section below, you will find supporting resources for each audience.
Teacher-led Professional Learning: Training for Teacher-Leaders
This section of the Teacher-led Professional Learning Toolkit includes summaries and links to more information about several well-regarded national teacher-leader training programs.
Tools and Resources to Support Professional Learning Communities
This online resource from All Things PLC provides tools and resources to support the design and implementation of professional learning communities. The toolkit includes adaptable manuals, protocols, master schedules, curriculum map templates, and worksheets for action planning, among other resources.
A Leader’s Guide to Building Instructional Capacity
This white paper from the Literacy Organizational Capacity Initiative (LOCI) analyzes the professional learning systems of four high capacity districts and distills a framework of 11 common factors. The framework presented in this white paper can be used by school districts to increase the coherence, ownership, and effective implementation of their instructional vision.
Effective Teacher Professional Development
This report from LPI sets out to answer the question of what constitutes effective professional development, identifying key features of effective efforts and offer detailed descriptions of these models to inform education leaders and policymakers seeking to leverage professional development to improve student learning.
The Mirage
In this paper, TNTP challenges the widely held perception among education leaders that we know what works when it comes to teacher development, and if we could just apply that knowledge more widely, we could improve the quality of classroom teaching in short order.
Evaluating and Supporting Principals
This report from the Wallace Foundation provides insights into the strategies and capacities that districts developed to evaluate and support their school leaders.
Supporting Principals’ Learning: Key Features of Effective Programs
This suite of resources from LPI details what effective school leaders do and how LEAs can support them in this work.