Professional Development

Northbrook / Glenview School District 30 believes that professional development is essential to improving student learning and promoting high achievement across all learning levels. As the means to enhance staff skills and competencies, professional development should provide opportunities to attain pedagogical content knowledge as well as build instructional and leadership skills, thereby providing continuous learning for all staff.

Our Goals

  • Adopt research-based standards of professional development inclusive of context, process, and content to enhance student achievement  (see National Staff Development Council standards).
  • Review and monitor student needs utilizing quality assessment data.
  • Explore and implement new professional learning strategies.
  • Oversee the implementation of the District #30 Induction and Mentoring Program.

Highlights of Our Program

District 30 prides itself on providing a comprehensive, job-embedded professional development program for all faculty. Opportunities for learning are offered in a variety of formats throughout the year, including Half-Day School Improvement sessions, classroom observations, and workshops with both in-house experts and outside consultants. The following are just a few of the highlights planned for the 2023-2024 school year.

In addition to Acceptance & Belonging, the professional development theme for this school year continues to be “Creating Teams to Collaborate for Continuous Improvement”. During our August Institute, at our Half-Day School Improvement Days, and throughout the school year, we will continually revisit this theme, relating our daily work to the importance of working collaboratively to establish learning environments that enable teachers to grow their practice.

As we continue our focus on the social/emotional well-being of our students and staff, we will implement Year 2 of RULER, a systemic approach to social and emotional learning developed at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. In addition, we will provide professional development on inclusive practices from experts in the field and work with TrueNorth, an educational cooperative that provides a variety of resources. And our teachers will continue their work around the tenets of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Curricular areas will be supported in a variety of ways. Our District Literacy and Math/Science Coordinators will continue to facilitate weekly Professional Learning Team (PLT) meetings in the areas of elementary English Language Arts (ELA), math, and science. Monthly PLT meeting will focus on social studies. Elementary ELA teachers will also be supported by the Lab Classroom, a job-embedded professional learning model that develops a collaborative culture and provides differentiated support to teachers. As part of the regular review of curriculum in the district, a comprehensive review of the Pre-K-8 English Language Arts program will be conducted.

Maple School teachers will continue to refine and improve their model for Professional Learning Teams, during which teachers will collaborate on instructional strategies that best meet student needs. In addition, teachers will continue to implement strategies to support students’ social and emotional growth. English Language Arts teachers will be implementing many of the instructional strategies shared by Penny Kittle, internationally known English Language Arts consultant. Social studies teachers will be working to ensure that their curriculum maps include the new state mandates. And all Maple departments will continue to meet around relevant topics, including media literacy.

Throughout the year, our teachers will continue to participate in professional development experiences that provide opportunities for rich discussion around content, instructional strategies, high-engagement of students, and assessment.