At Community Roots Charter School we believe that professional development is essential to a school’s success. As an abundance of research makes clear a successful school is one where everyone, adults as well as students, are learners.


Community Roots Professional Development Structures:

Summer Professional Development Institute
Community Roots uses two weeks in the summer as an intensive professional development workshop. Each summer the institute addresses the growing needs of the staff and school. The main objective for the first Summer Institute was to lay a solid foundation for the school with opening staff in what is most essential in achieving Community Roots’ mission.

The topics in Summer Institutes include: community building, differentiated instruction, collaborative team teaching, and backward design. Topics that will be explored throughout the year are introduced, discussed, and connected to student and teacher performance. In addition teachers have a significant amount of time during the Institute to work in grade level teams to plan for the upcoming year and to develop their collaborative team teaching relationships, systems, and structures. High quality staff developers with expertise in the areas of focus are brought on staff during the Summer Institute and remain working with staff throughout the year to support and guide teachers as they develop their practice.

Individualized Professional Development Plan
Teachers at Community Roots work in collaboration with a co-director to develop an Individualized Professional Development Plan (IPDP), incorporating long and short-term goals and mapping out ways in which to reach these goals

Weekly Professional Development Workshop
Community Roots allots two hours per week for professional development workshop. Workshop time is structured to best meet the needs of the staff and the workshop topic. Workshop structures include: whole staff, grade level teams, multi-grade level groupings, and IPDP partners. This time is used to focus on the monthly topics, all of which can be put into practice in all content areas and are designed to support the overarching goals of meeting the needs of all learners, using data to drive instruction, and developing successful models of collaboration.

Collaborative Team Teaching
Collaborative teaching takes advantage of the fact that there are two adults in the classroom rather than one, and capitalizes on that to make the class more effective. Co-teaching requires joint problem solving, co-planning, co-presenting, and co-processing. In order to promote positive and effective collaboration between teachers, Community Roots professional development includes: establishing and maintaining a scheduled time for communication, discussion of role responsibilities, sharing of expectations, modeling of language in order to communicate effectively, knowledge of collaborator’s strengths and weaknesses, and planning time.