What - The scoring rubric of the TLC grant led me to focus on a school cluster. Of the four clusters, I chose the one most technologically poor and most academically poor. Divisadero middle school, Crowley elementary, Mountain View elementary, Union elementary, and Conyer elementary. With the focus in grades 4-8, these five schools would give me a multi-year focus of the same students. Some students would have teachers who were being trained in the program and some students would not. Comparing these two populations would help determine the overall value of the program.
Related Evidence - e-mail setup or initial marketing.
So What - Standard 2 of the CPSEL focuses on "advocating, nurturing, and sustaining a school culture and instructional program conducive to student learning and staff professional growth." The cluster model embraces this idea in three ways. First, the model establishes an accountability system that helps to track the progress of students involved in a technology-rich learning environment verses students in non-tech-rich classrooms. This system will give me a clearer picture of what works and what does not. The key to this model is to stay consistent and not shift from practice to practice each semester or year. An identified set of teachers must remain in the program for all three years. Once the program begins, new teachers can not enter the system.
The second way this cluster model supports a successful culture is to build a sustaining bridge of vertical articulation between the middle school and their feeder elementary schools. The model will implement a series of 6-7 grade meetings that serves to exchange student expectations and to develop common understanding of what is expected at the 7th grade and what the challenges 6th grade teachers face.
The third way this cluster supports a successful culture is the nurturing aspect of working in the context of a tight family. This teacher group have a common goal, they have a common student population to work with. This common goal is very useful to establishing a learning community that collaborates, leads, and shares responsibility."
What's Next - For the past 10 years, I have lived in the world of one-time wonder workshops and drive by workshops. My energy has focused on the creativity and charisma of these workshops. Creative, innovative, engaging weekend or one-hour seminars that scored very high in evaluative tools but did not translate to recognized reform. There was excitement after a workshop but changes if made were not followed up. In a cluster model, these is implied continuity that can be used to assess and report change. Successful change requires events that incorporate context for new learning, time to practice and get comfortable with the new skills, reflection of the learning, and time to network this change with peers-family members. So for me, I now have a new view that the effectiveness of a training venue is enhanced through a cluster model.
