August 2007 — Professional Development
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Putting the LURE inLearning Community
A homegrown staff development program is polishing up teachers' technology skills and modernizing communication between home and school.
THE CHILDREN HAVE gone home and classrooms
are empty, but teachers at Florida's Sebastian Elementary
School are hard at work. It's Professional Learning Community
Day. One Wednesday every month, teachers with like
interests meet for professional growth. And the largest
group by far is in the computer lab, working with teacher
Paul Mucci and Technology Specialist Rhonda Drum, creating
classroom web pages to enhance communication with
students, parents, and the community. The meeting is
scheduled to last two hours, but most participants will opt
to work on their projects between meetings, eager to share
their progress at the next session.
Traditional professional development often consists of "gathering the clan" in a designated location, for a predetermined period of time, in the hope that a few attendees will apply what they've learned. But this professional learning community, called LURE (Learn it. Use it. Run with it. Explain it.), has struck a chord with school staff. Threequarters of the faculty have participated, and the remaining teachers will follow suit in 2007-2008, when classroom newsletters go online. In addition, more than 100 of the school's students now maintain their own web pages.
What's interesting is that the project wasn't launched for the usual reason—as a way to boost student achievement. Using adequate yearly progress measures as a baseline, Sebastian Elementary students are making the grade quite comfortably. For the last four years, the school has received an A-plus rating from the state, indicating that students in grades three through five are meeting their testing benchmarks in all designated content areas. But Principal Patricia Donovan and her staff know that students need more than high test scores to be successful global citizens. They saw that the school was technology- rich, but usage-poor: The tools were there, they just weren't being applied in the classroom, primarily due to a lack of training and ongoing support.
A self-taught early technology adopter herself, Donovan surveyed staff and found that while several teachers had completed individual training, overall skill levels varied greatly. So in 2004, Donovan decided to target information and communication technology (ICT) literacy as a critical growth area for staff and students. It was time to make a formal commitment to bringing staff ICT skills up to par so they could be used to enhance instruction and strengthen the home/school connection. "I was looking for a comprehensive approach to teacher training and implementation," she says. "We have a small district with limited resources, and our central office staff was not in a position to offer a great deal of leadership in this area."
