This Friday, Moffat County School District will participate in its latest District Professional Development Day. We’ve had several over the course of the school year, and will have several more. These opportunities to grow our team are extraordinarily valuable, and we’re proud to be working on doing them a new way lately.

We believe that teachers generally know where they can improve. They’ve had enough connection points with principals and learning coordinators and instructional coaches and Dr. Mathew Neal’s leadership to know what their strengths and opportunities are. Not to mention that intuitively, these skilled professionals tend to have a good feel for what new skills they’d like to bring to their classrooms to help kids grow.

That’s why, starting last month, our District PD has been organized into a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure scenario. District leadership sets up three periods that allow teachers to rotate through one training session per period of their choice. Are they interested in classroom management techniques? Maximizing their use of technology in the classroom? Parent connection? Goal setting? Leading learning with a growth mindset? There are so many skills and techniques that a teacher might be interested in learning or growing in, and we try to offer as many options as we can so that teachers can pick and choose where they want to spend their time.

This also allows us to bring outside experts in to train our teachers. This Friday we have trainers who are certified in training how to spot the signs of severe mental health deterioration and potentially short circuit a student’s path toward self harm with compassionate connection and resource referral. We’ll have more chances to do this as the semester continues.

We also have internal experts teaching what they know best. How to use programs to create great visuals to foster learning. How to focus on teacher wellness. How to demonstrate “withitness,” a concept that research shows dramatically decreases classroom disruptions. There are more than a dozen skills and techniques and programs that teachers are getting trained in this Friday, and each teacher will attend three different sessions. That means a ton of new skills will be entering your child’s classroom in the near future. And there’s more to come!

It also underlines the district’s approach and commitment to helping our people grow so that they can continue to improve the environment they create for our students. We are so dedicated to providing these opportunities to teachers, and we will continue to do so, because growing teachers grows kids, and that’s what we’re all about at MCSD.