Professional Development Day

Bright Beginnings Professional Development Day 2018

 

 

We do an outstanding job of providing our staff with initial and ongoing staff development and mentoring at Bright Beginnings. One of our Core Values is LEARN and so providing wonderful staff development and training opportunities for our teachers both new and veteran is important.

As educators, we understand that everyone learns in different ways and in this particular situation we are working with adult learners.  Just like in our classrooms, we try to incorporate auditory learning with hands-on learning, visual activities and throw in a big dose of fun. Adding fun training gifts and prizes,  brand new Bright Beginnings cozy, light blue t-shirts and yummy food, snacks and drinks rounded out our day.

Exceeding State Training Standards 

We pride ourselves on exceeding Virginia Department of Social Services regulations regarding training hours and set aside each Monday evening for training. Sometimes the individual locations work together on teaming activities, developing their outdoor classrooms, sensory activities or site-specific training. Other times, all three schools get together at one location and have a presentation by local or national experts, work together on developing curriculum or problem solve. It’s an important job working with preschoolers and we want our staff to feel the support of the larger school team behind them.

Researched Based Staff Development 

At least twice a year we close completely for a full day of professional development. This past Friday, August 17, 2018 we closed in order to provide staff essential training in preparation and planning for the upcoming school year. This year our staff development training was designed by Meg Petchel, who recently graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a Master’s of Education. Meg has worked for Bright Beginnings as a Curriculum Development. Consultant and brought her A game with the most recent research and trends in Early Education. We appreciate her efforts along with our directors and administrative team in delivering what our staff said was “the best training day ever.”

We kicked off the day with an ice breaker activity about “Famous Pairings’.  When staff arrived an index card with one part of a famous pairing was placed on their backs.  After everyone arrived their warm up task was to find their “partner” by mingling around the room. It was a fun and easy way to make introductions.  Some of the fun famous pairings included: Peanut Butter and Jelly, Ketchup and Mustard, Buzz and Woody and Michelle and Barack.

Getting Down To Business: Tinkering, Outdoor Classrooms and STEAM

We started with work on all reviewing all 12 months’ calendars and we introduced introduced two new core elements to our curriculum: our Tinkering Lab concept and our Outdoor Classrooms. We spent about an hour introducing and brainstorming the concept of STEAM,  which in education lingo stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics.

We work together on the importance and value of a morning meeting developing a classroom of a developing a community of Learners, the importance of consistency and routines and how to have a safe space in your classroom for all children.

Mindset

A brand new concept a growth mindset was introduced  which is based on the book Mindset The psychology of success how we can learn to fulfill our potential. This book was originally published in 2006 and is widely used I’m on parenting business school and relationship experts. The author Carol Dweck, Ph.D growth mindset. Growth Mindset. … According to Dweck, “In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort.”Aug 29, 2013. At Bright Beginnings we work to develop a Growth Mindset.

 

How We Play Outside 

Next we moved to another one of our Core Values which is PLAY and headed into a great discussion about our Outdoor Classroom and our goals. We discussed why it’s vital for children to be outside as much as possible, why we celebrate International Mud Day and brainstormed activities appropriate for use outside as well as inside.

As a reference please see these websites:

https://outdoorclassroomproject.org/

www.wildernesscollege.com/coyote-teaching.

 Our founder and educational specialist, Kathe Petchel, is a Level 2 Certified Outdoor Classroom Specialist and is passionate about the benefits of children spending time outside. Almost anything we do inside can be done outside including:

• Snacks and lunch
• Language arts and literature
• Art projects
• Science experiments
• Dramatic play and nature exploration
• Napping

Areas we also covered during our training day:

Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace, training on Go Noodle, our recomended app for brain breaks and a fantastic training about Behavior Management: Restorative Approach