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 | | Patrick Marolt |
Best Practices in Resource Leadership (March 2008)
Patrick Marolt, principal
Mike Wienen, assistant principal
Challenger Elementary School, Thief River Falls
“We invested in professional development in our teaching staff as a way to recognize and build on our staff’s unique strengths. This is not the ‘one-shot’ in-service led by a guest speaker. Instead, we have built a long-term, multi-year support for teachers.”
With the lack of adequate funding from the state, school districts are looking at ways to save money. In these difficult budget times, we asked our teachers to reduce their staff development money and put the difference back into the general fund to help with budget reductions. We reduced the dollar amount moderately during the 2002-2003 school year. The reduction was drastic at one percent for the next two years. We went from $282,639 to $128,554 for staff development.
At the same time we invested in the Literacy Collaborative from The Ohio State University (www.lcosu.org). The Literacy Collaborative Framework is a research-based comprehensive framework to guide reading, writing, phonics, and word study instruction in K-6 classrooms, as well as a professional development model.
In 2004, Challenger Elementary School did not want to commit significant resources to implementation of scripted, teacher-proof published materials in hopes of raising test scores. Our staff wanted something different. So, we invested in professional development in  | | Mike Wienen |
our teaching staff as a way to recognize and build on our staff’s unique strengths. This is not the “one-shot” in-service led by a guest speaker. Instead, we have built a long-term, multi-year support for teachers.
We trained three literacy coordinators during these lean years, who are responsible for providing ongoing learning opportunities and working with individual teachers to create a positive learning environment and make instructional decisions based on the individual needs of students. Also, they support teachers, model lessons, observe classroom teaching, and provide coaching aimed at shifting teaching to a higher level of precision based on student’s needs. As we write this article, our literacy coordinators are having a stakeholder meeting (classroom, special education, Reading Recovery and Title teachers) to look at data on each individual student. The goal is to work together and provide better instruction for all students.
Instruction for students involves a combination of reading, writing, and word study experiences that help children learn the purposes of literacy, as well as how written language works. Each grade level in our school has at least 2 ½ - 3 hours of interrupted time for their literacy instruction.
In 2006, Standard and Poor’s recognized Challenger Elementary School for significantly narrowing the achievement gap between economically disadvantaged students and all students in reading, based on the MCA test. We know that the Literacy Collaborative was instrumental in closing the gap.
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