The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) and the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) today released the “Closing the Gap Professional Development Toolkit,” the latest product of the collaborative Closing the Gap: Turning Data into Action project. Providing educators with a step-by-step curricular plan and a set of professional resources, the Toolkit helps educators use educational data to strengthen instructional practice. Through a series of reports and resources, Closing the Gap provides schools with best practices for reviewing and implementing student information systems (SIS) and learning management systems (LMS) solutions to become a more data-rich culture.
Each section of the Toolkit comprises videos, case studies, references to reading materials, specific teaching tools and other resources that aim to guide educators through building a data-rich culture. These teaching tools, which can be used collectively or separately based on a school’s current curriculum, are:
- “Direct Teach” content – provides participants with what they will learn to meet the stated learning objectives.
- “Checking for Understanding Worksheet” – provides participants with an opportunity to assess their understanding of the “Direct Teach” content.
- Application Worksheet – provides participants with an opportunity to apply what they have learned from information gathered via the “Direct Teach” information, “Checking for Understanding Worksheet” and related Closing the Gap resources.
- Facilitator’s Guide – provides the training facilitators with detailed instructions and related resources that must be used in teaching each segment of the training.
- Facilitator’s Checklist – assures the facilitators that key topics in the curriculum have been covered, discussed and understood by the professional development participants.
Closing the Gap is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates, and all project reports and resources are free to the K-12 educational community.
To access the “Closing the Gap Professional Development Curriculum Toolkit,” visit: http://turningdataintoaction.org/content/professional-development-toolkit-complete.
