State Level

• Ensuring Professional Development Meets Standards
• Professional Development Planning and Delivery
• Professional Development Content
• Miscellaneous

Ensuring Professional Development Meets Standards

• Policymakers and education leaders should evaluate their current teacher professional development systems for alignment with international standards.

Professional Development Planning and Delivery

• Make benchmarking to international standards a statewide priority.
• Provide high-quality technical assistance to schools and districts based on statewide best practices.
• Coordinate existing professional development that fills the gaps identified in the individualized professional development plans and that addresses alignment to international standards.
• Design and provide professional development to “re-tool” existing educators in content and instructional delivery, especially in gap areas.
• Use the professional development standards by the National Staff Development Council (see Additional Resources).
• Establish a public-private partnership to develop, pilot and implement a statewide academy to enhance the knowledge, skills and leadership of school and district administrators.

Professional Development Content

• Design, provide and require professional development for educators to ensure they understand how to align standards, instruction and assessments to international standards.
• Engage in a statewide STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) initiative to strengthen instruction and raise academic achievement.
• Develop and/or provide professional development for teachers to learn how to use academic content aligned to international standards to teach the seven “survival skills:” (1)
• Critical thinking and problem solving
• Collaboration and leadership
• Agility and adaptability
• Initiative and entrepreneurialism
• Effective oral and written communication
• Accessing and analyzing information
• Curiosity and imagination.
• Develop and/or provide professional development for teachers and administrators on differentiated instruction.
• Support the dissemination of resources, such as the work of Carol Ann Tomlinson, a former elementary teacher, Teacher of the Year, and current education professor at the University of Virginia, who is considered a leading expert in the field of differentiated learning. For more information on Carol Tomlinson’s work, see the Additional Resources at the end of this section.

Miscellaneous

• Ensure district and school standards are aligned to international standards.
• Ensure that licensed teachers are competent enough in their academic subject areas to handle world-class-level content expectations, and that they demonstrate the knowledge and skills necessary to teach to international standards.
• Use formative assessments, differentiate instruction and target individual student needs.
• Ensure elementary teachers are thoroughly prepared enough in math, science and English to successfully handle the deeper concepts that are required internationally.

Create a coordinated system of preservice and inservice strategies and practices.

Footnotes:

1. Tony Wagner, “Rigor Redefined,” Educational Leadership, 1-3 (Harvard Graduate School of Education), October 2008,
   http://www.siprep.org/prodev/documents/RigorRedefined.pdf.