Summer Institute 2017

The Greenwood Summer Institute is open and in full swing for its third year in a row. This week-long initiative has proven to be a powerful tool for teacher professional development and planning, as collaborative groups band together to develop strategies and a plan for growth in the coming school year.

We see incredible interest and engagement in the Institute every summer. Our teachers know that it is the best time of year for program development, given that the previous school year is still fresh in people’s minds. Teachers are assigned to their groups based on their academic focus, and each group’s subject is determined based on our goals for next year. After developing their strategies, the groups will share their findings and plans with the others.

At the Summer Institute this year, teachers are looking into six key areas:
- Student engagement and personalized learning;

- Grades 7 and 8 advising;

- Grade 8 integration (after focusing on Grade 7 integration last year);

- co-teaching philosophies;

- making the English program in all grades more personally relevant to teens; and

- redeveloping BTT (Information and Communication Technology in Business) to make it more relevant to our students and the programs they already use, like Google, Prezi and video editors.

The Institute is run entirely in-house, helmed by both Mary Gauthier (Executive Director, Greenwood Centre for Teaching and Learning) and Heather Thomas (Vice Principal, Student Learning), their work together serving as a model of the Summer Institute’s collaborative nature. They emphasize that the Institute does not ask teachers to redesign the wheel, but rather to tweak and improve the policies already in place. “A huge part of innovation is tweaking,” says Mary. And, we believe, a huge part of the success of Greenwood is the kind of innovation we are seeing this week at the Summer Institute.