Professional Development

This training serves as an orientation to The Visual Non-Glossary. Participants will access their VNG accounts directly and participate as a student in structured conversations using the VNG. In 3-hour sessions, participants will also plan out a VNG lesson and practice implementing structured conversations.

In this training, participants who are already familiar with The Visual Non-Glossary learn how to leverage students’ voices to extend whole-class conversations for deep exploration and inquiry of academic content. Participants will plan a VNG lesson that incorporates extended academic conversations and other activities that boost academic language.

Want to see more reading and writing in content-area instruction? This training shows participants how to teach content and build literacy skills at the same time, by anchoring academic reading and writing with structured conversations and small-group visuals. Participants will learn how to create, differentiate, and structure reading and writing.

Inquiry is at the heart of the learning process. Learn how to transform students’ curiosity into wondering, and wondering into probing questions and investigation in Science, Social Studies, and Math classrooms. Participants in this training will engage with strategies that get students asking questions, making predictions, and justifying reasoning. 

This training helps administrators, instructional coaches, and district staff develop their teachers by coaching through a lens of academic language, engagement with structured visuals, and student-centered pedagogy. In this training, participants will practice the coaching cycle and learn a clear, step-wise approach to developing teachers. Furthermore, participants will engage in a structured approach to supporting all teachers in the coaching cycle.

For cohorts of ~6 teachers, we go through the coaching cycle (pre-conference, observation, post-observation conference) several times throughout the school year. In each cycle, we focus on making one or two enhancements to lessons from the lens of engaging students with academic language and structured visuals.

Looking to develop your instructional leadership teams? We also encourage campus and district leadership to observe our coaching, then debrief about the effective coaching practices that help their teachers grow.

Are your teachers looking to improve their craft by seeing specific strategies in action? We can model a specific strategy with a teachers’ students, then debrief with that teacher afterwards. This can be incorporated as part of the coaching cycle or as a standalone practice.

A great alternative, or addition, to a single-day training: we spend 40 to 80 minutes modeling a single high-yield strategy to PLCs or teachers with shared planning times. In these mini-trainings, we also devote time to planning out the strategy in an upcoming lesson and reflecting on implementation successes and challenges with other strategies.

What is the lens for structured conversations and student engagement around visuals? We conduct short (10- to 20-minute) walk-throughs with instructional leadership teams and debrief about what we see holistically and how the campus can leverage its strengths to enhance instruction in every classroom.

This training helps administrators, instructional coaches, and district staff develop their teachers by coaching through a lens of academic language, engagement with structured visuals, and student-centered pedagogy. In this training, participants will practice the coaching cycle and learn a clear, step-wise approach to developing teachers. Furthermore, participants will engage in a structured approach to supporting all teachers in the coaching cycle.

Note: VNG licenses are encouraged with this training, but not required.