It takes the whole school team coming together to set students up for success.
School and district leaders gathered last week for Berkeley County School District’s June Summer Leadership event. The event was held at Trident Technical College
Thursday was extra special because it served as a time for everybody to have a seat at the table, so to speak; cabinet members, district officers, principals, assistant principals, coaches and teachers joined forces to do a deep dive into data-driven instruction.
School teams spent the day looking at instructional practices and how to enforce and/or refine them.
College Park Elementary Principal Dr. Kimberly Murray spoke highly of the experience.
“Today is just a great day for us to get together with our school leadership teams to talk about data and how we can use data to drive our instruction and be more intentional in what we do in our schools that impact student outcomes for all of our students,” she said. “It’s a time where we can collaborate with other professionals – we can talk to the people around our table, gain ideas and really get a good game plan for when school starts back.”
Berkeley High math teacher Brittany Colley and Cainhoy Elementary third grad teacher Bailey Peterson were among the teachers who participated. Colley said one of things they worked on was creating assessment calendars for the upcoming school year and including times to look at data together and subsequently create school-level assessments for classes that do not have district assessments at this time.
“With focus on the data, we can look at teacher and student strengths and weaknesses and then incorporate our lessons to reteach and work on what they’re struggling with,” she said, adding, “I was really honored to have a seat at my school’s table today, just to be included in some of the decisions as a teacher. Our administrators really care about what the teachers in our school think, and picked a couple of teachers to just be voices for the whole group, so it was really an honor to be included here today.”
Peterson said it is a collaborative effort to make sure schools’ staff is doing the best for their students.
“For me as a teacher to have a seat at the table means that my opinions are valued, it means the district-level people and administrative team want me there, because I work with students one-on-one every single day,” she said. “So it’s a great opportunity for me to give my feedback and let them see a different perspective of what our students need.”
