Professional Development

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 2024-2025 school year.

Our work this year will align with the newly developed District 30 Strategic Plan, focusing on the goal of wellness, belonging, and safety and the goal of differentiating professional learning to ensure that it meets the needs of our teachers and students.  During our August Institute Days, at our Half-Day School Improvement Days, and throughout the school year, we will continually revisit these goals, relating our daily work to the importance of working collaboratively to establish learning environments where all belong and teachers are able to grow their practice.

Practitioners at all three schools will continue work on inclusion, working with our Inclusion Specialist on inclusive practices in the classroom. In addition, teachers will continue to address the tenets of diversity, equity and inclusion with newly created lessons and recently collected resources.  Year 3 of RULER, a systemic approach to social and emotional learning developed at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, will be rolled out to the parent community.

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.  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 a result of last year’s Pre-K – 8 English Language Arts review process, all K-5 classroom teachers will be piloting two new comprehensive ELA programs.  They will be supported throughout the pilot by content specialists from the publishers as well as our Literacy Coordinator.  

In addition to their work in the area of equity, Maple teachers will continue to explore and implement reading strategies across content areas and delve into innovative classroom engagement strategies.  All Maple teachers will continue to meet about 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 inclusivity and belonging, diversity/equity/inclusion, content, instructional strategies, high-engagement of students, and assessment.