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YES Prep Ensures Immediate Classroom Success for First Years

January 12, 2010 by Chris Barbic

Teaching Excellence is the year long professional development program for all beginning teachers at YES Prep and ensures that new teachers are immediately successful in redirecting the life paths of their students toward college graduation. By heavily investing in our young talent, we increase the learning curve for new teachers and speed up the teacher development continuum. Teaching Excellence provide multiple layers of support for new teachers including, but not limited to:

1) Professional Learning Experiences

The cornerstone of Teaching Excellence is relevant and scaffolded professional learning experience that allows new teachers to implement instructional and management strategies in their classrooms the very next day. Topics include: parts of the lesson cycle, backwards planning, meaningful grading and rubrics, tracking objective mastery, facilitating effective guided practice and group work, asserting authority, checking for understanding, and many more. Time commitment: Monday nights (once a month), Saturday mornings (once a month)

2) Time to work independently or collaborate

Teachers are also provided independent work time and time to collaborate with other teachers in their content area across the system.

3) Lesson Plan Review with Instant Feedback

Professional Learning Experience workshops include lesson planning clinics so that teachers can immediately implement newly-learned skills. At the conclusion of the work time, lesson plans are turned into instructional coaches for review and are returned to teachers the following day.

4) One-on-one meetings with instructional coaches

Instructional coaches are always available for help and are on campuses meeting with and observing new teachers every week. One-on-one meetings allow coaches to talk about specific areas of growth.

5) Model lessons from instructional coaches

Instructional coaches do 3-4 model lessons per semester as often as needed.

6) Observation Cycles and Feedback

Instructional coaches are required to observe and give formal feedback twice per semester per teacher that they coach.

In addition to receiving support from Teaching Excellence, new teachers also receive support from their campus instructional leaders in the following ways:

7) Instructional Support Specialist/ Dean of Instruction

Instructional Support Specialists and Deans of Instruction work at all campuses to ensure that all teachers – new or veteran – are aware of YES Prep’s instructional expectations and are able to meet those expectations successfully. They participate with all teachers in planning support, observation and debrief cycles, as well as playing an evaluative role.

8) Course Leader/ Content Specialist

Course Leaders have experience teaching a specific course (i.e. Biology or 6^th grade English) and Content Specialists have experience teaching in one content area across multiple grade levels. These instructional leaders are available to teachers to share their expertise as often as possible. Content teams – led by Course Leaders and Content Specialists – meet once every 6 weeks to align units and assessments and to collaborate across the entire YES Prep system.

For more information about Teaching Excellence, please email teaching.excellence@yesprep.org or to apply online visit www.yesprep.org/work.