Welcome to PGS Writing Resources – a place to come for ideas when writing a post-observation conference report, an action plan or an evaluation. 

The idea for PGS Writing Resources is based on administrators and teacher leaders best practices of using the PGS handbook to to assist in writing reports. They said that when they need to write a document related to one of the professional growth systems, the first place they go for ideas is to one of the PGS handbooks. They often find themselves looking at a standard (or competency in the case of support professionals) and taking an idea for a claim either from the performance criteria or from the examples of evidence table. Then they adapt the claim to their specific circumstances, add evidence from their observation and write an interpretation.

Resources

PGS Writing Resources provides you with the same sections of the three handbooks that you are accustomed to using in hard copies, but now these sections are in Microsoft WORD so that you can easily copy and paste sentences or phrases into the document you are creating. For the Teacher-Level PGS, there is an additional feature. For each standard, following the examples of evidence table is a section titled: “Additional Claims by In-District Trainers and Consulting Teachers” to provide you with more options.

Individualized Feedback

One of the most important components of all three professional growth systems is providing individualized feedback to build the capacity of employees. We know that writing post-observation conference reports, action plans and evaluations requires a great deal of time and energy. PGS Writing Resources is designed to help make writing these documents more efficient and effective. But it is important to remember that the best feedback is tailored to the person and the specific situation. That is why we encourage you to use and adapt the information in PGS Writing Resources to assist you in communicating to help our employees continually enhance their skills.

Some Time Saving Tips and More Training

You might want to consider saving PGS Writing Resources as a folder on your desktop or laptop so that it will be there, at your fingertips, as you are writing. Just click on the icon below and the folder will be saved on your computer.

If you are interested in taking a workshop about how to use PGS Writing Resources and to learn other ideas to increase efficiency and effectiveness when writing documents, go to Professional Development Online (PDO) to sign up for a session.

More to Come...

In the future, we intend to expand and improve PGS Writing Resources and we invite you to help build this tool to make it as effective and useful as possible. If you have ideas for additions or changes, or if you have developed claims that you would like us to consider posting for others to use, just email Carrie D’Amour Booth, Instructional Specialist Technology at Carrie_Booth@mcpsmd.org or call her at 301-353-1345.