Windsor Central School District teachers engaged in a range of professional development activities during Friday’s Superintendent’s Conference Day.

Elementary educators concluded their two-year training in LETRS, a program that teaches the skills needed to master the foundational and fundamentals of reading and writing instruction, using research-proven strategies.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced that all teachers and teacher training programs will shift to the Science of Reading.

The science of reading refers to a body of research from the fields of education, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and neuroscience, that explains how individuals learn how to read and best practices for reading instruction.

“This was an opportunity to train all of our staff and get in front of these best practices to ensure all of our students are getting instruction to ensure they’re successful in reading, writing, listening, and speaking,” said Barb Tasber, Director of Learning, Leadership, & Technology.

Windsor Central Middle School hosted a workshop on artificial intelligence, specifically seeing if AI can help answer the four critical questions of collaborative teams: what do we want students to know, how will we know they know it, what will we do if they don’t know it, and what will we do if they already know it?

“As with all things in education technology, it’s about added value and time saved. It’s not just about the shiny new thing. Can AI identify trends in assessment data that we wouldn’t see or that would take us a long time to see?” said middle school teacher Cole Battaglini, who led the AI session. “I believe AI is a tool that can usher in the next Renaissance of learning. We’d be doing ourselves a disservice if we didn’t build a comfort level with it. It can help us create future-ready learners, which is why we’re here.”

High school teachers focused on learning instructional strategies for the classroom, using data by course and subgroup to provide equitable instruction, leading to mastery and success for all students. The presentation accounted for the varying learning styles of students and identified how to embed a variety of strategies to meet all learners.

“The whole point of this day is to give teachers a toolbox full of instructional strategies so that all learners can achieve at high levels,” said WCHS associate principal Kelly Warwick.

Teachers left Friday with a plan about using these strategies in their classrooms as soon as next week.