While many students slept in on Wednesday, Dec. 7, teachers, classroom assistants, administrators, secretaries and central office staff came to the Library Media Center at 8 a.m. for Professional Development Day.

According to Maureen Bur, the director of secondary instruction, PD gives staff an opportunity to engage in learning that is “meaningful” and “relevant.” PD is also used to the reinforce the school culture that administration is trying to emphasize.

“(PD) was definitely a success,” Bur said via email. “Staff (members) were actively engaged and reflective on today’s professional learning and how it will positively impact instructional practice in the classroom.”

PDs occur throughout the year for elementary, middle and high schools while district PDs happen in August and November. North’s most recent PD was last Wednesday and the next is scheduled for April 27. The district-wide event has been around for more than 20 years.

Last year, the district adopted a strategic plan with the message “One GP.” Through this message the school system is able to highlight the idea that at Grosse Pointe Public Schools everyone learns every day. After experiencing PD for the first time, English teacher Emma Huellmantel found she was able to immerse herself in the learning process more than on a regular school day.

“It’s a really nice way for us to connect with each other, to reinforce some of the values we share, to be inspired by each other and then also to talk about and celebrate our kids and the experiences we’re having in the classroom,” Huellmantel said. “We usually come away with some sort of task or challenge to bring back into the classroom after PD, so it’s something that we all leave thinking, ‘alright I have to do this in my practice tomorrow or next week so that my students have a better time learning.’”

Junior Kitty Clark agrees. She sees PD as a benefit not only because of the time off school, but also because of the new skills and ideas teachers bring into their classrooms from it.

“I do think PD is important for the school. I think it illustrates new techniques to the teachers and gives them kind of a better idea of how to run classrooms in different ways for the different students,” she said. “Every student learns in a different way, and I think that (PD) days help find new techniques to kind of work with the different variations of our student body.”

During the day, participants can choose subject specific sessions, including coaching culture, culturally responsive teaching, intro to design thinking, authentic assessment, unconscious bias, creating a classroom of engagement and connecting classrooms to the world. Last November, the staff was able to pick from 144 sessions. According to Bur, about 95 percent of the sessions were facilitated by Grosse Pointe staff members, while the other five percent were people like school quality consultant Jay Marks.

On Wednesday, everything began as it normally would: Principal Kate Murray managed the activities and exercises and talked about the day to come. However, in the afternoon, Murray passed the torch to Marks. In his two-hour long presentation, Marks discussed unconscious bias, microaggressions, classroom culture, race and equity in schools.

“He was really focusing on reminding us to look at our students as individuals and not to make assumptions about them because we know that everyone has some sort of background that leads them to maybe have biased views about people,” Huellmantel said. “It was a reminder for us that we need to make sure that we get to know our students more and that we’re not making those assumptions. On top of that he was just really fun and so I enjoyed hearing from him and learning from him and being reminded of these concepts that we know as teachers but sometimes we need someone to come in and give us a refresher.”

In addition to Murray’s and Marks’ presentations, Huellmantel learned about the relationship between the brain and challenges through the sessions she took. She said she wants to make sure that her students are challenged because that’s when they’re learning.

Huellmantel plans to implement some of the strategies she learned about in her own classroom. She hopes that she can have a chance to talk with more teachers than she did at this PD during future ones.

“One thing that might be helpful would be to talk to more teachers in PD because we were at a table with three other people and we didn’t have as many opportunities to branch out and talk to a different group of people,” she said. “The overall effect is to reinforce the values that we have at this school, what we do here in this building to inspire each other as teachers, remind each other really why we got into this profession and what matters most in the classroom. But ultimately the effect is to provide better learning experiences for our students.”