The CSDC Professional Development Conference was held on Thursday, February 8, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Cromwell.  The featured speaker was Stephanie Hirsch, National Staff Development Council Executive Director, who focused on "Promoting Powerful Professional Development to Advance Student Learning".

Stephanie introduced the participants to NSDC's revised Standards for Staff Development and the importance of districts taking the Standards Assessment Inventory to determine how professional development in the district is viewed.  The Standards can be grouped into three areas context, process, and content and directly reflect NSDC's vision that professional learning be results-driven, standards-based, and job-embedded.

To reinforce the notion that the NSDC Standards are 'living and breathing,' Stephanie also introduced participants to the Innovation Configurations, or IC maps, of the Standards.  An IC is a description, along a continuum, of the components of a practice and variations in the use of each component.  IC maps help to explain what something 'looks like' in practice, what ideal implementation is, what unacceptable implementation is, and what all the 'shades of gray' are in between.  When a school or district is considering implementing a new program, or making significant changes to an existing program, designing an IC map can be one way to help 'measure' how the implementation efforts are going and what needs to be done to move them along. 

 Approximately 100 educators from around the state attended including superintendents, district and building leaders, classroom teachers.  The lunchtime guest speaker was Christopher Poulos, the current CT Teacher of the Year.