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    The faculty of the Community Academy of Science and Health engages in ongoing professional development to reflect, grow professionally, and adjust our practice so that our students will achieve.  The 2021-2022 focus of our work is:
     
    Instructional Focus:
    Through a framework of equitable literacy instruction, engage students in standards-based, grade-level work that accentuates a consistent implementation of cornerstone skills and routines across grades and content.
     
    School-wide Priority Question:
    What do students, specifically ELLs, males and students w/ Special Needs, struggle with most when developing confidence and perseverance as an independent learner? 
     
    Instructional Priorities:

    Gold Standard Project Based learning that embodies:

        • Cognitively Demanding Paired Text Tasks: A task that challenges the Zone of Proximal Development, uses higher order thinking and requires complexity.
        • Strategic Formative Assessment: Purposeful teacher moves to gauge student understanding in real time and used to inform and adjust future instruction and planning. It can be student led and should be embedded in the instruction.
        • Student Discourse: Students are engaged in oral or written cognitively demanding tasks that increase academic skill sets (content related or social-emotional) designed to lead to student ownership of their learning.
     
     
    To refine our practice, we engage in professional development in the following ways:
     
    1) Tri-weekly content based Professional Learning Communities
    2) Monthly full faculty workshops
    3) Bi-annual school-wide Learning Walks
    4) Quarterly analysis of student work 
    5) Teacher led Instructional Leadership Team
    6) Weekly Inquiry Facilitation
    7) Administrative team Professional Learning Community