Professional Development at Beloved

Professional Development at BelovED

Top professional athletes constantly seek to refine their skills - and top educators do too. At BelovED, we support the on-going professional development of our faculty through training, through coaching, and through our teachers' collegial sharing within professional learning communities. Prior to the start of school each September, our leadership team and all faculty members participate in a two-week summer institute. Training progresses from an overview of our school philosophy and design to inā€depth workshops on building our target culture and climate and succeeding with our values, study habits, and character development programs. During this process, our faculty also learns how to excel with our Language Arts Literacy and Mathematics programs and how to implement other key elements of our school design. To cite two examples, our educators learn about "Champion Teacher" classroom management and teaching skills, such as those encouraged by instructional expert Doug LeMov(1), and how to work with our computer-based, academic monitoring system and use student learning data to measure the success of school design elements, so we can continually refine these elements for the benefit of the entire school community. Building on this late August training, we schedule a number of additional training days during the course of the school year. These training days increase staff unity while helping staff members learn new strategies for addressing behavior and instructional challenges. We then further augment this formal training with less formal coaching. BelovED Community Charter School is divided into academies that consist of three grade levels, each with its own Dean of Instruction and Dean of Students. These Deans are available to model successful instruction and classroom management techniques for teachers and to provide teachers with personal coaching and support. In addition, on a weekly basis, grade-level teachers meet as a professional learning community to share ideas, collaboratively improve their practice, and identify potential improvements in school and education program design.