Did You Know?
Gene Wilhoit, former Kentucky Commissioner of Education and currently the executive director of the Council for Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) in Washington, was the keynote speaker at the 2007 Kentucky Teaching and Learning Conference (KTLC). In his address he spoke of “… the next great challenge in public education in America: the challenge of educating every one of our children to graduate prepared to be productive members of a global society. Our challenge is to transform learning for each of our students in a way that makes them not only productive members of our country, but prepares them for success in a global context that takes full advantage of the 21st century in which we currently operate.”
This “facilitation” of high-quality learning for each one of our students to succeed in the 21st century is the core of how our educational system must transform itself as we move forward. The address, 21st Century Learning for Each Child, was modified from an address Wilhoit gave at a CCSSO fall meeting. The address was accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation.
You can find the transcript of the CCSSO meeting and the KTLC PowerPoint by going to Gene Wilhoits KTLC Address. As an opening to his address, Wilhoit shared Did You Know?, a PowerPoint presentation developed by Karl Fisch, a teacher at Arapahoe High School in Colorado. It is a simple, yet powerful depiction of Wilhoit’s message. You can view this presentation by going to Did You Know?
Strategies for Finding Teacher Time
This week we continue the discussion on how schools and districts can use time more effectively to establish ongoing, embedded professional development in schools. According to an article published in the March 2007 edition of The Learning System (National Staff Development Council), schools and districts that have carved out more time for professional learning have typically relied on one or more of the following strategies:
1. Bank Time
- Lengthen the regular school day and “save” the extra minutes to create teacher “learning” time.
- Create regularly scheduled early release/late start days.
2. Buy Time
- Hire substitutes to fill in for regular classroom teachers to enable those teachers to plan or learn together.
- Add an extra teaching position in the school for a rotating substitute teacher who would fill in for teachers in order to free them for teacher learning time.
3. Common Planning Time
- Set common planning times for teachers by grade level, team or content area.
- Link some of these common times to other non-instructional times (i.e. lunch) so that teachers still have individual planning time.
4. Free Teachers for Personal Learning
- Enlist administrators to teach classes.
- Authorize teaching assistants and/or university education students to teach classes at regular intervals, always under the direction of the classroom teacher.
- Team teachers so one teaches while the other learns.
- Plan daylong, off-site learning experiences for students so teachers can have a large block of time to learn.
5. Use Existing Time More Effectively
- Provide professional learning during staff meetings.
- Spread time from regularly scheduled professional development days across the calendar to provide more frequent, shorter school-based learning opportunities.
If you are a member of the National Staff Development Council, you can download this article for free by going to The Learning System. Otherwise, you can find many other resources about the use of time by going to Resources for Staff Development - Time for Learning. Remember to send your district’s innovative ideas for finding teacher learning time to David Cook.
Quotable Quotes
“If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.”
Ignacio Estrada