Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), winner of the 2011 Broad Prize for Urban Education, recently selected ASCD as its new, districtwide professional development partner.
Administrators in the district’s Center for Teaching and Learning sought a scalable professional development solution that would support efforts to align professional development to the North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards and meet key goals of the school system’s Strategic Plan 2014. To meet this need, CMS chose ASCD’s PD In Focus® online professional development tool. The district provides academic instruction to more than 141,100 K–12 students in 159 schools throughout Mecklenburg County, N.C.
ASCD’s PD In Focus online application provides educators with on-demand access to hundreds of hours of videos, related resources and activities. The program couples examples from contemporary teaching with insight from important voices in education today. Users can access it anywhere there is an Internet connection, including from mobile devices and tablets.
"Our mission at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is to maximize academic achievement by every student in every school," said Christina Efird, teacher PD director of CMS’s Center for Effective Teaching and Learning. "To achieve this mission, each educator in each CMS school needs effective professional development resources to help them continue to meet the needs of today’s rapidly evolving students."
Based on a needs assessment, CMS has created an online, internal database of focused professional development resources. An important piece of this database is CMS’s Academic Resources Library (CARL), which offers educators a wide variety of instructional resources from ASCD’s PD In Focus tool.
“We look forward to continuing our collaboration with the entire Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools team as they continue efforts to support the success of each learner,” said Executive Director and CEO of ASCD Dr. Gene R. Carter.
