EdCamp Elk Grove: A Teacher-Led Professional Learning Day

By the Collab Lab Team

Check out the Professional Learning Day we enjoyed at Elk Grove High School and Across District 214!

EdCamp Elk Grove: 

Who: All staff
What: Teacher-led Professional Learning. Professional Learning that responds to staff needs.
When: April 4th, 2016
Where: Theater, classrooms, labs
Why: Build our professional learning networks within and across departments and the District. Take next steps in our own learning to impact student learning.
How: Ignite Sessions, EdCamp Sessions, Content-Alike Sharing sessions, PLC time, and crowd-sourcing our resources on Google Docs and Social Media


Our EG EdCamp, planned by our Collab Lab team in collaboration with our colleagues, was a kind of a hybrid of the traditional EdCamp format.  Like EdCamps, staff had the opportunity to propose sessions the same morning of the In-Service day, but we also pre-planned some workshops based on prior feedback from staff about their needs and interests.

Overview of the Schedule

Sample Ignite Presentation

EdCamp Schedule

Feedback from staff was positive.  The ignite presentations were quick, just 90 seconds, sharing a variety of strategies that staff could learn more about in the EdCamp sessions that followed. We also followed the EdCamp format of using Google Docs for shared notes. 

A new twist to our In-service day was to add Content-Alike sharing sessions for our final EdCamp time slot. Staff were invited to come back together in course alike groups or PLCs to share highlights, questions, follow-up needs and feedback for future in-service days. Here is an example:

Check out this link to the resources shown above.


Professional Learning across District 214:

All of the District 214 School ITF teams planned similar teacher-led professional learning experiences, in collaboration with their colleagues, for the April 4th In-Service Day. Check out this Storify to learn more about what those professional learning experiences looked like!