As a first-year teacher, I have learned that everything becomes an acronym.

I am “a BT doing PD on CIF strategies.” Translation for those who pursued career paths other than teaching? “A beginning teacher doing professional development on Common Instructional Framework strategies.” (Not sure what the Common Instructional Framework is? Click here.)

But despite the crazy alphabet soup, I was excited to attend NC New Schools’ New Teacher Institute last month to learn more about this new discourse community I am now a member of.

This two-day professional development set up short classes for all the elements of the CIF including: collaborative group work, writing to learn, classroom talk, scaffolding, questioning, and feedback (which would be literacy groups for our students). What I got from this was a lot of new strategies and resources, including the chance to talk to other teachers about what was going on in our classrooms. At one point, in less than two minutes, I had a list of five new strategies for my English classroom. It was amazing.

The instructional coaches — individuals who work with teachers to improve our teaching strategies and thus our students’ understanding — walked us through strategies to implement in our classrooms and guided us through trying them. I left each session with a new strategy for my classroom, including one partnering strategy I have already tried in the week since.

In addition these practical strategies, I also got something unexpected out of this training. I hoped to meet other teachers, share resources, and gain new teaching strategies — and I did. What I didn’t expect was to be reminded what it was like to be on the other side of the desk.

In doing the activities I will expect from my students, I was able to examine the purpose of these activities from both a teacher and student eye view. I’m excited to use these activities with my classes because I was excited about these activities the first time I learned them. New Teacher Institute PD helped me gain teacher perspective and regain learner perspective on my purpose in the classroom — I was able to critically examine my pedagogy as a BT by engaging with the CIF through new eyes.