It was the stuff of some parents’ nightmares and some students’ revenge fantasies: On Monday, Durango School District 9-R students had the day off, while teachers were stuck in the classroom for a full day of lessons.
In an age where few parents can afford not to work, setting aside a whole day of the school week for teacher learning can force parents into unhappy child care improvisation.
But Durango School District spokeswoman Julie Popp said professional development days such as the one Monday are critical to improving students’ classroom experiences.
She said Monday was one of six such professional development days scheduled to take place throughout the school year, with five of them occurring “under BOCES umbrella, so they happen region-wide, and you get teachers from Mancos, Dolores and Cortez driving in.”
Popp said there was “a lot of value to it. You need to know instructional engagement strategies and have time with your colleagues to improve your performance in the classroom.”
This year, teachers’ professional development days will focus on writing and math.
And while Durango parents may roll their eyes, on Monday, most teachers agreed with Popp that a day dedicated to improving teaching was allowing “teachers to be the best they can in the classroom.”
There was a slight Mardi Gras feeling in the Durango High School cafeteria. Teachers sat huddled around tables that were strewn with binders, Crayola markers, and highlighters as a coach from The Write Tools, a teacher-training program, issued these instructions:
“Closely read the two articles about new rules for school lunches. Write a paragraph explaining to your parents several specific changes in the school lunch program. Use examples and evidence from the text to support your Big Ideas.”
The scene, though surreal, was one of great industry, with teachers scurrying to formulate topic sentences, nervously glancing at their colleagues’ work and furiously smuggling the relevant information from the articles into their model paragraphs.
Asked whether this was useful, teachers from Animas Valley Elementary said it was.
Gala Gaines said one tactic they’d learned that day – making students describe aloud what they were about to write – would be very useful.
Animas Valley Elementary School Principal Lisa Schuba said it would help kids organize their thoughts, while teacher Evie Bromiley said it would “help our reluctant writers and students of second language.”
They said this kind of in medias res teacher training was vital because it allowed teachers to get to grips with changing standards.
“A lot of our changes are occurring as we speak,” said teacher Stephanie Herbst.
Schuba pointed to the new emphasis that curriculums are placing on nonfiction texts: “Now, they are saying that to prepare kids for the 21st century, they have read and interpret multiple nonfiction texts.”
Bromiley added, “And cite specific examples in the text.”
“This let’s us keep up to speed,” Schuba said.
Teacher Cathy Mewmaw said getting this kind of training amid the school year meant, “We can apply these strategies immediately to our instruction.”
Upstairs in the DHS library, prekindergarten through second-grade teachers were undergoing their own rigors, as The Write Tools coach explained strategies whereby younger students focus on details in a story though they might not yet be able to read or write.
One teacher presented her storyboard – a hand-drawn poster summary of a story that visually lists interesting or important details – to the room.
What was the story about?
The teacher asked the room to guess.
Someone guessed correctly: It was about Louis Braille.
Vanessa Fischer, principal of Sunnyside Elementary, stood up and said, “I really liked that you asked them to guess.”
Later, a teacher described her poster that illustrated an apparently popular woodpecker narrative. “Ours is pretty much like everybody else’s – except we did a ruler for the seven inches,” she said, pointing to the ruler her group drew next to the woodpecker.
“Nice touch,” said a woman at another table.
Florida Mesa Elementary School teacher Carrie Lyons said she’d learned lots of great strategies for getting kids more comfortable with writing and was especially impressed with one method: “Just getting them thinking about the text: When I read” – out loud from a text – “you listen, when I stop reading, you write.”
She said if teachers successfully implemented all these teaching strategies at every level, “it would be really useful. If we continued with this for more than a year, these kids would be amazing writers, if we got to stop implementing new policies, and stick with what we got,” she said.
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
