Atlanta Public Schools (APS), serving more than 51,000 students in the greater Atlanta, Ga., metro area, has selected digital solutions from ASCD to meet their district-wide professional development goals.
Administrators in the district’s Offices of Teaching and Learning and School Improvement and Leadership sought a suite of online professional development resources that would support APS educators’ professional growth, enable career advancement throughout the district, and help meet APS’s goal to provide each student with a rigorous, high-quality education. To meet these needs, APS administrators chose ASCD’s PD In Focus® and PD Online® professional development tools. ASCD is one of four organizations providing online professional development services to the district.
The PD In Focus tool is a web-based professional development resource from ASCD that offers access to hundreds of hours of high-impact videos, related resources, activities, and insight from today's voices in education. ASCD’s PD Online courses use multimedia and digital content to meet the professional development needs of almost any type and size of learning group, ranging from individual learners to statewide deployments and integration with university programs.
“In order to meet our goal of providing students with a rigorous, high-quality education, Atlanta Public Schools must place highly effective teachers and leaders—supported by targeted, research-based instructional models—in classrooms,” said Dr. Kristal Ayres, APS director of professional development. “To develop those individuals, we sought professional development partners whose content would connect the work of great thought leaders in education to work being done by educators in the classroom. Through our new partnership with ASCD, we now have a flexible, scalable professional development resource that helps us meet that need.”
In coming weeks, APS will deploy the PD In Focus and PD Online tools, whose Common Core State Standards courses were recently approved by the Georgia Department of Education as sources of Professional Learning Units, in 106 learning sites across the school system. Once fully implemented, content from both tools will be linked to the district’s evaluation models so professional development staff can fully support educators’ individual growth plans.
