NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Sheila Berridge with Hutchinson USD 308 is looking forward to the All Hands on Deck professional development day on Jan. 3, 2024 at Hutchinson Community College.
"We know that professional development has a high impact on our teachers ability to teach our students and for our students to achieve in school," Berridge said. "Jim Knight, from Lawrence, he's going to come speak to us, he's our keynote speaker. That will take place at the Sports Arena and then we will have breakout sessions. There are over 100 breakout sessions that teachers may choose from."
Over 1100 Reno County educators will be in attendance.
"We have anything from instructional strategies, high impact instructional strategies to classroom management," Berridge said. "We even have coaching sessions with athletics and leadership and then SEL, diversity, you name it, we have a broad spectrum."
This has taken a while to get together, because in order to have an event of this size, you need to have everyone have the same day off of school and this event was really the thought of Buhler USD 313 Superintendent Cindy Couchman.
"The Reno County Superintendents have met as long as I have been in the positions, leadership positions in Reno County," said USD 308 Superintendent Dr. Dawn Johnson. "We meet once a month, just to collaborate about what's going on. At one point, probably 18 months ago, Cindy Couchman, the superintendent at Buhler, said, would you guys be willing to have a collaborative, we come back after Christmas and we kind of have a Reno County professional development day? We all sat around and said, our calendars are never, we're never, we'll have to sync our calendars and that's going to be hard. No one's going to agree to it. What could it possibly look like? She just kind of kept prodding and finally asked us to really ask our calendar committees. We all, eventually, got on board with that. This has become the amazing event that it has."
The event has 27 sponsors with around 100 presenters, all on the HutchCC campus for an entire day, and a vendor fair at lunch along with the final hour of the event as a chance for grade level teachers from all districts to get together and talk about what it means in their classrooms.
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