Customized Professional Development

PCG-CRM's teacher professional development embraces the effective use of best instructional practices, tools that foster rigor and experiences that engage and motivate students of all abilities. The series includes:

• Content area teacher professional development for science, social studies, mathematics, English and unified arts teachers.
• Collaborative peer mentoring that introduces content area teachers to specific strategies to develop their reading, writing, vocabulary development, and presentation skills while preparing teachers to be collaborative peer mentors.
• Workshops for literacy coaches who often are not experienced with the literacy demands of all content areas or with coaching other adults. These workshops build a professional learning community among coaches while deepening content literacy knowledge.

PCG's Professional Development Series

• PCG-CRM's content literacy workshops helps teachers integrate literacy and learning in productive ways, differentiate instruction, and enable more students to succeed in the content-focused classroom. This is important because many middle and high school teachers have little background in how to use a focus on literacy development to strengthen content area learning; how to engage reluctant readers and writers; how to support improved vocabulary learning and critical thinking; and how to develop an inquiry based classroom that promotes rigor.
• These workshops provide content teachers with practical, specific examples and applications, a common language to use with students and with one another about literacy and learning, and strategies they can use to reinforce literacy habits and skills within and across content areas.

Peer Mentoring Professional Development

• Collaborative peer mentoring professional development prepare teachers to be collaborative peer mentors. The workshops introduce content area teachers to specific learning strategies that students can use to develop their reading, writing, vocabulary development, and presentation skills. This highly successful research-based model of teacher professional development combines instructional best practices, professional learning communities, protocols for reflection, peer observation and conferencing, and protocols for examining student work.

Literacy Coach Professional Development

• Workshops for literacy coaches guide literacy coaches to understand and meet the literacy demands of all content areas and include strategies for coaching adults. These workshops build a professional learning community among coaches while deepening content literacy knowledge, provide tools, approaches and strategies to assess the knowledge and practice of content area teachers, and strengthen coaching skills through video, case studies and problem-based collaborative inquiry.