Professional Development

Compelling, interconnected learning

 

Overview

Evolution Alliance serves schools and districts by identifying, implementing, and evaluating high-leverage strategies designed to engage, enhance and inspire learning for both student and adult learners. 

With our greatest focus on equity through fairness and inclusion, we help teachers and leaders create structures and environments that foster student-centered learning for ALL children.

Evolution Alliance provides advanced professional development skills for your school district in two possible contexts: our CogKnow Software System and on a consultative basis.

The Evolution Alliance leadership group has an average of over 30 years of experience transforming processes and local standards for school districts in search of significant measurable results.

Please review our areas of focus below, designed to elevate not only your district’s achievement levels, but also to increase engagement and excitement with education reimagined.

 

Professional Development Areas of Focus

Note:  ALL professional development provided by Evolution Alliance will not occur in a “stand and deliver” model since it should model what is expected in active learning environments; all instruction is highly interactive and engaging. We craft each offering to provide coaching that increases the capacity of those within districts. Our ultimate goal is to work ourselves out of each district by enhancing existing structures to support all adults and students.

Leading for Equity: Central Office and Building Administrators

  • Equitable learning conditions
  • Giving and receiving feedback to/from communities and schools
  • Finding focus for implementation
  • Monitoring and adjusting protocols, procedures, structures and time
  • Communication that works
  • Surviving initiative fatigue
  • Redesigning schools and learning environments for increased equity

Leading the Work of Standards, Instruction, and Assessment

  • Instructional leadership
  • Developing high-quality success criteria for teachers
  • Becoming the lead learner of buildings and districts
  • Monitoring standards implementation
  • Feedback on instruction
  • Coaching assessment validity/fidelity

Assessment Literacy

  • Creating high-quality formative assessments
  • Assessing content validity
  • Comprehensive, balanced assessment systems
  • Formative to summative assessment
  • Designing high-quality formative assessments
  • Designing high-quality rubrics
  • Understanding commercial diagnostic assessment data
  • Assessing metacognition

Data Analysis to Guide Instruction

  • The role of cause and effect data
  • Making inferences from data
  • Aggregation, triangulation, and disaggregation of data
  • Basic and inferential statistics made simple
  • Using data to drive instructional decisions
  • Making systems and program decisions based on data

Strategic Applications of Rigor

  • Applying affective rigor
  • Applying cognitive rigor matrices
  • Standards – instruction – assessment connection
  • Differentiation
  • Intervention
  • Trajectory of standards
  • Rigor of assessments
  • Using rigor for feedback
  • Assessment capable learners

Intervention & Differentiation Process

  • Understanding Tier 1, 2, and 3 interventions
    • RTI process design
    • Data gathering
    • Reporting structures
  • Logistics
  • Progress monitoring
  • Recordkeeping/timeline development

Creating High-Quality Teams:

  • Roles
  • Data analysis
  • Instructional strategies
  • Success criteria
  • Leadership monitoring
  • Reporting structures
  • Autonomy vs. micromanaging
  • Shared leadership structures

The Assurance of High-Quality Instruction: A Reflection on COVID

  • Equity
  • Engagement
  • Expectations
  • Instructional strategies
  • Strategy review chart
  • Personalized student-centered learning

Implementing Standards for General Populations

  • Creating learning targets and objectives
  • Developing high-quality success criteria
  • Understanding prioritization
  • Making the most of supporting standards
  • Trajectory of rigor

Implementing Standards, Instruction and Assessment for Special Populations

  • Creating learning targets and objectives
  • Developing high-quality success criteria
  • Understanding prioritization
  • Making the most of supporting standards
  • Trajectory of rigor
  • Instructional strategies for special populations

Opening new pathways is at times challenging but is the only way to move forward, keeping pace with a diverse and ever-changing education landscape. Evolution Alliance invites you to step into a future, powerfully reshaped by your leadership team, teachers and students.