Teacher Professional Development
These programs are critical to the development and understanding of practice in partner schools and to the development of the partnership professional learning community that supports the M.A.T. program. Innovative professional learning comes in a variety of forms, including:
- Collaborative learning teams (e.g., curriculum teams) that join teachers from different partner schools and faculty together, for purposes that include deepening understanding of subject matter, disciplinary learning, and powerful curriculum models; developing teaching practice; and assessing student work and development as writers, readers, and thinkers in a particular discipline.
- Reflective practice and inquiry groups that cycle through a series of complementary learning experiences, in particular, lesson-planning workshops, teacher rounds, and close examination of student work.
- Teacher Rounds, a collaborative learning practice during which small groups of teachers, faculty, and/or M.A.T. students visit, observe, and reflect on a particular class, based on a protocol and set of questions developed by the host teacher (See Del Prete, T. 2013. Teacher Rounds: A guide to collaborative learning in and from practice. CA: Corwin). Listen to author Tom Del Prete explain what teacher rounds are and discuss the benefits they can provide to support collaborative teacher learning as a reflective and inquiring process.
- Graduate-level courses, including summer institutes for teachers and M.A.T. students, are co-taught by faculty and teacher-leaders.
- M.A.T. program collaborators, who, in addition to serving as mentors in the M.A.T. program, join with Adam faculty as instructors in the M.A.T. program and/or host Teacher Rounds for M.A.T. interns. Their classrooms, in effect, serve as case studies of practice.
- The Adam Teacher Scholarship supports an outstanding candidate in the M.A.T. program.