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Building towards sustainability
Get parents, teachers, and principals tuned in right from the start 1. Meet with principals, explain the goals of the project and ask them to meet with teachers to let them know that a professional development opportunity in reform mathematics was around the corner and that they (the principals) would be involved with teachers as receptors of professional development. We also had them tell teachers that parents would be invited to explanatory workshops in each building prior to implementation and asked them to encourage teachers to attend those. 2. All of these meetings had a mathematics component. I felt that if we demonstrated rigorous reform math to principals, teachers and parents before they heard the simplistic arguments coming out of the Mathematically Correct (MC) group, the community would be less likely to associate what we were trying to do with the MC arguments. 3. We issued a constant barrage of thank you letters to teachers, and presented vignettes at school committee meetings, in addition to the notebooks full of rigorous material and positive propaganda that teachers and administrators received during the project. Our sustainability is predicated on the establishment of a collaborative culture during the project. Our teachers, especially at the elementary level, have come to expect the regular scheduling of meeting time across the district, specifically for them to process the implementation of new materials and instructional strategies. That expectation has expanded to other disciplines. My appeal to teachers was this. I told them that expertise in worksheet instruction should expect compensation only slightly above minimum wage. Anybody can pass out worksheets and correct them with a template. If they wanted to be valued, they had to do better than that. We were also trying to create a community perception that punctuated the difference between collegiality and congeniality, the latter being people who were friendly and talked to each other, the former assuming that the talk was about the art and craft of teaching, i.e. analyzing student work and developing a repertoire of differentiated instructional strategies.
Thomas E Foley,
8/3/2000
Impact Of LSCs' Progress, Leveraging Support
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