GAP School Professional Development

Our Education team spent seven wonderful days working together to prepare for the school year. This year our main goals for professional development included:

• The importance of building relationships with our school community

• How do we lead through a lens of inquiry

• Reviewing the GAP School policies & procedures

While learning together we jumped into the guiding question for the week: What could inquiry look, sound, and feel like at GAP School? We identified that it would need three key ingredients from our Education team:

1. Relationships: we need to provide our learners a safe place to grow and thrive. This includes physical safety as well as psychological & emotional safety.

2. Making learning visible: We are doing incredible things each day at GAP. Making our Learning journey visible for the Learners at school is an important way to cement their growth. Making learning visible for our families and community helps to display the wonderful things we accomplish in a year at GAP School.

3. Inquiry culture through protocol & routine: humans like to know what to expect, even with a degree of flexibility within that protocol & routine. When you know what you expect you can put your attention and focus into other things. Each of our flocks will work with their Learners to develop protocols and routines that help to support community, relationships, and learning.

We structured our time with our Educators to reflect the time that we will have with our Learners. We introduced topics, investigated, asked questions, and worked to continue learning and growing. Much like our Learners we did independent research, took time to collaborate and plan, and started the steps to develop what GAP culture will look like in our fourth year.

We also took time together to play and explore. On the river adventure, our Educators were able to experience their own Exploration time. We know the value of play and exploration for all ages, including adults. Just like Exploration time at school brings our Learners closer, taking that time intentionally during professional development, brought our Educators closer too.

The highlight of our professional development days was our Back to School Night where we were able to see our GAP families back at school. Our 2023-2024 GAP Educator team is ecstatic for another incredible year of learning together!