EDUCATOR TRAINING & PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

ASER will provide the most recent and data-driven best practices for your teachers and administrators, whether they serve in school classrooms and/or language centers. Each of our master teachers have advanced degrees and over 20 years of experience in the top-rated prep school of the United States. They have served on the College Board for AP exam grading and standardized test design. Our purpose is to share our techniques with our international partners with customized practices that fit your unique learning environments. Our professional development specializes in four areas; however, we will focus content based upon your needs, and if there are other areas of enrichment you seek, we can design these for you as well.

1. Effective Pedagogy and Learning: How do we spark curiosity in our students? How do we develop critical thinking skills in a variety of learners? How do we train students to be effective learners on their own? We will focus on these essential questions. Through demonstrations and teacher practicums, we will practice a variety of techniques to render our teaching more effective and relevant to learners. In this process, we will also explore avenues of engagement with students, which will in turn help and motivate them to self-actualization.
 

2. Lesson Planning: What are the common characteristics of effective lessons? How does the teacher know, in real-time, if the lesson achieved its planned outcomes? Using backwards design and "making learning whole", teachers will develop and refine their own strategies and templates to improve the consistency and efficiency of each and every lesson.

3. Assessment and Evaluation: Often used synonymously, there are fundamental differences between the concepts of assessment and evaluation. What are these differences? When should the classroom be assessing, and when should it be evaluating? How is this accomplished? And how can we design ways to measure competency with verifiable data? We will explore how skills can be measured not only in terms of demonstrable competencies, but also how these measures inform us for subsequent programming in order to address student needs and areas for further growth and development. We will analyze data and learn how to design subsequent programming based upon this objective analysis.

4. Project-based learning (PBL) and individualized learning through technology: How is project-based learning defined, and what are the markers of well-designed, critical-thinking group work? How do we assure that all students are learning in the group, and how is this learning measured? How might we employ technology to improve individualized learning? What software options are there for students, and how might they be used in the classroom? We will explore and design effective projects and evaluative rubrics. We will look at open-source websites and software that can assist all learners across disciplines to improve specific, curriculum driven skills.