professional development & Collaborations aS

A VALUE

Professional staff development is essential to an organization’s success and to teacher’s realizing the importance of building on one’s experience within the daily life of the school. It is through ongoing exchanges with colleagues as an effort to analyze and develop our work with children and families that teachers grow and work becomes more meaningful.

Professional development is seen as a continued dialogue with others, sharing ideas and opinions, negotiations, agreements and disagreements giving value to collaboration and learning as individuals in a group who see ongoing research as an indispensable part of our work. It is important for teachers to see themselves as participants of their own ongoing professional development.

Documenting our ongoing learning processes with children and families provides an opportunity to define the quality of our work and our development.

Professional development includes visiting other schools and attending conferences and seminars in the spirit of sharing and building knowledge with colleagues.

The Exhibit

Public and private schools represented in this exhibit have participated in the Innovative Teacher Project roundtable series. An action was taken to support these schools by creating a director’s network to value their professional development.

This group decided together to extend the focus of the 2006-2007 roundtables “Evolution of Schools Inspired by the Reggio Approach Developing Identity” by creating an exhibit that showcased each schools identity and one key value of the Reggio Approach to early childhood education.

Each individual school took one value to elaborate and created their piece through collaboration with teachers, children and parents from their school.

This exhibit has shown at the California Association for Young Children conference, San Jose, the Hiram Johnson California State Building, San Francisco and many Bay Area roundtables since its completion