Throughout the school year, we offered different Lunch & Learn opportunities to our staff. This was our first year implementing this type of PD to teachers, so we thought we would start small to see what works and what teachers would like to learn about during the short period of time.The topics we offered Lunch & Learns on to our staff were:
- Student Passion Project - Students spent time defining their personal passions that they would share with teachers and staff. These passions were then presented as speaking practice for their Senior Capstone in the spring.
- Where my ELs at?? - Presented by two teachers, how to find and read WIDA scores as well as what to do with information gathered from the scores was shared.
- Diving Deeper Into the 6Cs - The Assistant Superintendent and myself lead an open Q&A session about what the 6Cs might look like at different levels and possible implementations.
- Intro to Newsela - Presented by our District Media Specialist, Newsela was introduced as well as ways it could be integrated across curriculums.
- Looking Into Critical Thinking - I facilitated this session to teachers as a way to look closer at how we are incorporating critical thinking as part of our lessons and units. This was informal and conversational to help teachers hear what is being done in other grade levels.
As I was working on this blog post, I received an email from A.J. Juliani with his latest blog post. I love the emails I receive from him as they are always so thought provoking and full of resources. One of the things he shared was from Peter Nillson and the four stages to learning (On Nilsson's blog post, A Cognitive Model for Educators: Attention, Encoding, Storage, Retrieval (Part 2 of 14)). I found it very relevant to to what we hope to accomplish with our Lunch & Learn program.
As I am already starting to think about our Lunch & Learn program for next year, I am working at trying to reach a wider audience and provide a variety of options. I have some ideas in the works already, but would love any outside ideas!