The Bethune Institute for Robust Teaching

The Institute will host a 4-week summer Institute beginning Summer 2021. The Institute will run 4 hours a day for 4 weeks.  We will accommodate 10 teachers per grade level cluster. Schools can elect to send teaching assistants as well. TA counts can double participating staff by school cohort. The expectation is that teachers and teaching assistants who will be working together in the upcoming school year can participate, based on decisions by participating schools.

Professional Development Sectors

In literacy, professional development will include decoding in the early grades and across grades reading comprehension, vocabulary and academic language, and composition within a special focus on reading in the content areas in middle upper cycle grades.

In mathematics, PD will focus on learning progressions, that is how broad concepts are related within grade clusters (e.g. how broad understandings of proportional reasoning unfold in concepts and operations around fractions, percentages, ratios, exponents, ), what is entailed in teachers understanding and building on student errors as opportunities, what is entailed in teachers understanding multiple mathematical pathways through which problems can be solved in order to move beyond simply teaching single procedures.

In social studies, PD will focus on teaching concepts about historical, civic, economic, political and social functioning, rather than simply teaching facts, helping students to comprehend and interrogate primary and secondary sources for perspective and bias so that instruction moves beyond textbooks alone; and to better understand the diversity of human cultures contributing to the evolution of nations and the role of geography in influencing human communities.

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In science, teachers will learn to implement the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in ways that are responsive to the students they teach.  The NGSS call for the integration of content knowledge in the three broad sub-disciplines of science (physical, life and earth sciences), engagement with the practices of sciences, and interrogation of concepts that apply across the sub-disciplines.