Professional Development
At Curtis, one of the ways we uphold our value to “improve always” is to offer a variety of professional development opportunities for our employees. Usually, each fall, all faculty and staff align on one area of focus and partake in a schoolwide professional development session to set the tone for the school year. In recent years, we have, as a whole group, explored themes such as the explicitness of belonging, ways of being in our professional community, and innovative approaches to collaboration. We also provide diversity, equity, and inclusion professional development and training on a regular basis throughout the course of the school year.
In addition to those whole group learning opportunities, faculty delve into division-specific topics. For example, recently, our Lower Elementary faculty focused on differentiation in the classrooms and literacy instruction, while our Upper Elementary teachers discussed grading for equity and universal design for learning.
Thirdly, each year, we run several task forces around in-depth curricular research and change-making. Currently, we have an Anti-Bias Task Force that focuses on our anti-bias curriculum as well as other initiatives in diversity, equity, and inclusion, a Reading Comprehension Task Force digging into research and best practices around literacy and knowledge-building, and a Social-Emotional Learning Task Force working on aligning lessons and practices to promote wellbeing.
Fourthly, we provide funding to support teachers seeking individual professional development opportunities such as workshops and conferences. These can range from local or virtual workshops to national conferences, such as the NAIS People of Color Conference.
Lastly, faculty members are encouraged to attend professional development opportunities to further their individual professional goals. Faculty goals include individual professional goals, institutional goals in connection to a school initiative, or a team goal that the department or grade level team is exploring together. These goals are identified in collaboration with their division heads during fall one-on-one conferences.
