|
By Kim Turley and Leslie DeRose
Students aren’t the only ones who go on field trips. Earlier this week a delegation of 16 teachers and administrators from the Pajaro Valley Unified School District (PVUSD) traveled to the Central Valley to learn how a school district with challenges and demographics similar to ours has been able to dramatically improve student performance.
The Sanger Unified School District mirrors our school district in many ways. It’s in a rural, agricultural area east of Fresno. Eighty two percent of the students are minorities and 62 percent are Latino. It’s a district where 77 percent of students qualify for free or reduced price meals. Forty eight percent of households don’t speak English as their primary language.
Like PVUSD, Sanger had many of its schools fall into “program improvement” status because of low test scores and poor student performance.
“That was really a wake-up call for us,” says Marc Johnson, the district’s superintendent. “We started asking ourselves, ‘what are we missing?’”
Soon after that “wake-up call” three years ago the district implemented a policy of staff collaboration and professional development aimed at boosting student performance. Since then the school district has made remarkable strides. This year four of the six schools in program improvement have been removed from the list and a fifth narrowly missed removal. Meanwhile, five of the district’s 13 schools were named “California distinguished schools.”
Johnson chalks it all up to the creation of a “professional learning community,” a cohesive, inter-dependent group of teachers and administrators who continuously collaborate and act on what they learn in an effort to improve student achievement.
Johnson says the creation of a professional learning community is driven by four fundamental questions: What do we want students to learn? How do we know they’re learning? How do we respond when they aren’t learning? How do we respond when learning has already occurred?
For the Sanger school district, fostering a professional learning community has been a powerful tool for school change and improvement.
“It’s paying huge dividends for us,” says Johnson. “We’ve turned things around in a very short period of time.”
PVUSD Superintendent Dorma Baker led the field trip to Sanger and she was impressed by what she saw--teachers and administrators united behind a common vision and specific course of action.
Not only has the district been able to boost student performance through collaboration and a common strategy, Baker said she was struck by the spirit of cooperation and high teacher morale. She spoke with one teacher who turned down a job at a higher paying school district nearby because of the rich professional environment offered at the Sanger school district.
“It was a wonderful opportunity and exactly what we needed to see,” says Baker.
Inspired by the example of the Sanger school district, Baker is going to keep the momentum going and work with the field trip attendees and others to create a professional learning community tailored to the needs of PVUSD with the expectation that we can achieve similar successes here. By studying the best practices of other school districts and collaborating with each other, we as teachers, administrators and trustees can improve what we do as well.
Kim Turley and Leslie De Rose are the president and vice president respectively of the Pajaro Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees.
|
