You know, Kate, even if you get one taker, you have succeeded. If you and just one other colleague start having these professional conversations, you have then impacted many more students than you would have done if you just kept quiet. You might consider talking to your administrators about how they might support this dialogue...could they provide refreshments or dinner at your meetings? Could you use faculty meeting time?
Someone, I think it might have been Bev, reminded us recently that change takes time. It surely has for my school, but change has occurred, incrementally, and is still occurring. As teacher leaders, we just need to keep looking for opportunities...find the "early adopters"... those teachers open and amenable to change and start there. Eventually, the momentum shifts...but you have to be persistent. I am not a title one reading specialist, but I do see, finally, some small shift in emphasis to math in recent years in our district. Some schools (like mine) see the need for a math specialist...a need for math intervention early...and it is about time. I wish I had access to a math specialist when I was in school. I think a little "tier two" intervention early on would have made a real difference for me. As for research based programs in Math...that is one of the things we are discussing in school improvement meetings in two weeks...along with new research based reading programs! Jennifer Palmer Reading Specialist, National Board Certified Teacher FLES- Lead the discovery, Live the learning, Love the adventure. Reading furnishes the mind only with the materials of knowledge. It is thinking that makes what we read ours. -John Locke From: K Link Sent: Thu 6/12/2008 10:22 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Understand] Understand Digest, Vol 4, Issue 6 When I read what Jennifer wrote about creating a thinking classroom and a thinking school, it put the words to my "inner conversation" that I have been having for the last few months (thanks to all of the members of the mosaic listserve). I had started with filling in staff development suggestions, from the surveys that we complete at the end of the year for various workshops in my school and system, that I would love to have a book study to look at some of the new and outstanding books (including Ellin's). I even went so far as to list titles that would be a good beginning of a "brainstorm" list for my asst principal, including even some math titles. Well that seems to be as far as it went because no one has responded. I was a little depressed about it, but now I feel inspired and I am going to send an email to my collegues at school to see who might be interested in starting a book study own our own. I have asked my close friends if they are interested in doing a book study on To Understand. Do you think that it will be OK to do that if most of them have not read Mosaic? It would be great if we could planning lessons together using the ideas in To Understand and then get feedback on them. Anyway, thanks to everyone for the motivation (including ellin for her book which has caused me to reexamine several things in my professional world). Jennifer - I am a Title I Reading Specialist as well (but my NBCT is MCG). Do you see the emphasis shifting to Math (probably since the National Math Panel released it's report in March)? Maybe the stress for RESEARCH BASED PROGRAMS will also shift to Math. Kate in NC _______________________________________________ Understand mailing list [email protected] http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/listinfo/understand_literacyworkshop.org _______________________________________________ Understand mailing list [email protected] http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/listinfo/understand_literacyworkshop.org
