After returning from an AI Summit in Denver, Colorado where we’d discovered a vacant lot full of playful, entertaining prairie dogs, our Teaching and Learning Department re-created the mascot for our upcoming professional development club that begins in January. We got the idea for the club from a team of teachers in Gwinnett County, Georgia who’d presented their voluntary PD club at the fall GACIS conference in Athens, Georgia in September. They are the BATS (Better At Teaching Strategies). We decided to be the BEES (Becoming Excellent Educators). We designed a bee logo and even ordered little bees as decor for our meetings. But then we saw those prairie dogs and considered their initials. P.D. We called one by its initials and realized we were calling him a given name – Petey.
Petey the Professional Development Prairie Dog. We liked it better than the bees. So the week before Thanksgiving, we spent some time with our Instructional Technologist designing our new mascot and creating an invitation to gather and garner interest on universal strategy topics. My team asked me to create a limerick for the invitation, so I created one to show that this form of Professional Development we plan to offer will be teacher-driven, not district-driven. We sent out a QR code on the invitation, promising snacks and fun, and we can’t wait to start this new club.
Here is our invitation:
I’m hoping that someone who is reading this may have a voluntary PD club in your school system. If so, I’d love to know your formats and structures of successful PD clubs. Please share and lend any expertise that would be helpful for us.
Common Threads 