Curriculum Advantage Launches new Professional Development Courses

In an effort to help you effectively integrate technology into your schools, we have revamped our entire Classworks Professional Development process. Following a yearlong review of successful implementation models, our new catalog of Professional Development courses offers a diverse selection of classes that will help your school better reach the education goals you have set.

The new Professional Development course list offers 25 separate classes designed to help schools reach their implementation goals more quickly.

In our endeavor to insure that Classworks successes are results-driven, we partner with 15 to 20 schools each year, conducting studies to determine what practices work best to achieve specific goals. By studying these practices and breaking them down to their basic essences, we can replicate these models in other schools. These best practices are now integrated into these new Professional Development courses. Of the 25 courses, 18 are brand-new, which gives you exactly what you need, even if you are seasoned users of Classworks.   

“We have taken the best of what we’ve learned while working with our schools and created new modules addressing such topics as summer school programs, raising test scores for students failing AYP, and sessions on how to bring other technologies such as Smart Boards into use with Classworks,” said Debbie Nicholas, Curriculum Advantage’s vice president for customer service. Some of the other classes include “Reviewing the Reports, Analyzing the Data,” “Classworks for Credit Recovery,” and “Standards-based Instruction for All Students.”

Continued Professional Development will help build on your school’s past accomplishments, sustain current initiatives and add instructional components and skills to get the most from your Classworks implementation. These courses will help your teachers quickly and efficiently plan, deliver and integrate instruction while using Classworks.

Even if your teachers have received the basic training when Classworks was first installed, the need for additional professional development is varied but constant: Changes in your school’s implementation plan, new teachers who haven’t used Classworks before, and expanding the use of Classworks into new areas of instruction. This full complement of new courses also covers multi-year implementation models. So whether you have first-year novices or advanced instructors, we now have the options that suit your needs.

Studies Show Training Important to Implementation Success

The recent publication of several studies by the U.S. Department of Education shows that many education software regimes are falling short. One of the key reasons is implementation. Districts only see gains when they have good implementations and effective training.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Education – Institute of Education Sciences released a study titled Effectiveness Of Reading And Mathematics Software Products: Findings From The First Student Cohort. This research suggests that flaws in most technology implementations are mainly due to poor integration into the standard curricula. Classworks is proud to say that we were cited as one of the only instructional software companies to be effective in a comprehensive research study by Johns Hopkins University last year (Effective Programs in Elementary Mathematics: A Best-Evidence Synthesis, by Dr. Robert E. Slavin and Dr. Cynthia Lake).

We have found that the schools with the most successful results with instructional technology are the ones with solid action plans. In our Implementation Planning meetings, we can help you identify specific district/school/classroom goals and how those will be accomplished at the schools. For instance, if there’s a general goal to improve AYP scores, we will develop a training program for teachers of mainstream students and then a more aggressive plan for “bubble” kids.  Regardless of when you became a Classworks customer, we can come over and help you revise or revamp your implementation plan, to ensure you are getting the most from your instructional technology investment. 

Tell us your academic goals. We want to help you reach them.