This summer, the entire faculty of 18 teachers jointly attended workshops targeted at 2 areas. A week-long workshop on team building helped the faculty with communication skills. This coming summer, teachers will use a portion of the 2 weeks after students leave to analyze results from multiple assessments. They designed July to be different from other months. Intensive remedial work is offered for students who need it.
Teachers spend the second half of the day improving their own skills.
Teachers spent other joint sessions in workshops on assessment. They also spent time refining rubrics, aligning them so that teachers are all using the same criteria to assess students' work. Only three teachers out of 20 have left the school since it opened. This is the ISTA-talk mailing list.