Professional Learning

For 18 years, CDL has been a trusted source of specialized professional learning services for educators – teachers, principals, teacher leaders, related specialists, paraprofessionals, and parents. CDL professional learning is aligned with Learning Forward’s Standards for Staff Development.

The goal of CDL’s professional learning services is to help educators develop and apply the knowledge and skills necessary to help their students learn to higher levels. Using an on-the-ground, in-the-trenches approach, we advance teacher effectiveness by providing educators with professional learning that is specific and relevant to students’ and teachers’ needs.

CDL has special expertise in the areas of learning differences, differentiating instruction, evidence-based teaching strategies, and building the capacity of teachers. We tackle real-time issues such as ways to remediate struggling readers, differentiate instruction for diverse learners, and build and sustain collective capacity.

CDL’s professional learning is customized to fit the specific needs of the educators with whom we are working. The educators and CDL professionals together determine professional learning needs and design a plan of action.

The professional learning uses varied formats and media, focuses on teaching and learning of specific content, applies research on change, connects to practice, sustains support, and builds strong working relationships among staff to solve student learning issues.
We work with individual educators, small groups of educators, entire school faculties, and with district-wide capacity-building initiatives.

CDL’s professional learning follows a student-driven ongoing process. The Professional Learning Cycle of Continuous Improvement below summarizes CDL’s professional growth actions that yield increased student learning.

CDL’s professional learning is implemented by a cadre of local, national and international experts, including reading and literacy specialists, math specialists, leadership specialists, learning specialists and interventionists, psychologists and speech and language pathologists.

To learn more, go to current initiatives, email us at learn@cdl.org or call us 504-840-9786.

"CDL's professional development armed our teachers with the ability to identify specific learning problems in the areas of attention, memory, language, organization, writing, and higher order thinking, and then to respond with strategies targeted to specific problems. As a result, student learning has increased, and student and faculty motivation has increased."

— Kathy Riedlinger,
CEO, Lusher Charter Schools