Governor Strickland Outlines His
Long-Awaited Education Reform Plan
Submitted By Deb Tully
SDCO Board Member
The following is adapted from an article written by new State Superintendent of Instruction, Deborah Delisle. The article appears in Ed Connection: the Superintendent to Superintendent Newsletter put out by the Ohio Department of Education.

On January 20th Governor Ted Strickland gave his annual State of the State address to the Ohio General Assembly.  The Governor kept a campaign promise to make education a priority of his administration.

In the State of the State, Gov. Strickland announced his plan to reform education in Ohio. While many of the final details of the plan are not in place and dependent on going through the Ohio legislature, there are several areas in his speech that should be highlighted, including:

• A new evidence-based system for primary and secondary education will place resources where students most need them. All-day kindergarten will be funded for every district.

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Stimulating the Schools: A Plan for Federal Action
By Pedro A. Noguera & Alan M. Blankstein
Pedro A. Noguera is a sociologist and professor of teaching and learning at New York University, in New York City. Alan M. Blankstein is the president and founder of the HOPE Foundation (Harnessing Optimism and Potential through Education), in Bloomington, Ind.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has enormous potential to improve the quality of our nation's public schools. This legislation represents a historic investment in children's futures that could eventually change the very future of this nation. This is an opportunity that cannot be squandered.

Over the last eight years, educational progress in the United States has been modest at best. President Barack Obama's administration will need a bold new strategy for reforming our public schools if they are going to play a more significant role in moving the nation forward. There can be no future for the auto industry, for example, if the schools in Detroit and other manufacturing centers are not capable of educating a new generation of workers to design the cars of the future. In cities and towns across America where jobs are being lost at a dramatic rate, revival of local and regional economies will require strategic investments in human capital. This will be possible only if our schools have highly trained and motivated teachers and a curriculum that provides students with 21st-century skills.

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Master Teacher News
By Julia L. Simmerer
Director, Office of Educator Standards, Center for the Teaching Profession,
Ohio Department of Education
 
Senate Bill 2 directed the Educator Standards Board to define a "master teacher" in a manner that can be used uniformly by all districts and to adopt multiple, equal-weighted criteria to use in determining whether a person is a master teacher.  It also directed districts to report the number of master teachers employed in the education management information system and The Ohio Department of Education to include the number of master teachers employed by each district on the district's report card.

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Implementing and Documenting Professional Learning Teams at Pickerington High School Central
By Scott Reeves & Janie Sheraw
Janie Sheraw has been teaching for 33 years, and she is currently the Career Based Intervention teacher/coordinator at Pickerington High School Central and a facilitator for PHSC's professional learning teams. She has been a member of ODE's Regional Local Professional Development Support Team since its inception and was recently named an Ohio Master Teacher.

When Pickerington High School Central Principal Scott Reeves communicated to staff that he would like to establish Professional Learning Teams within the building, his idea was met with both enthusiasm and curiosity.  Meeting with counselor Maria Perez-Robertson and teacher Janie Sheraw, they researched information about establishing PLTs, the focused goal  of increasing student learning and ways to document results. 

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Connections to School Improvement Through the Work of PLCs
By Shelly Dason
Shelly Dason, Principal of Pleasant Elementary in Marion, Ohio has Masters Degree in the field of Educational Administration with Superintendent Certification from The Ohio State University. Through her 23 years as a building level administrator and teacher, she has gained skills in the area of school-community relationships, efficient resource utilization, time management, curricular issues and networking.

Pleasant Elementary's school's leadership team in Marion, Ohio recently implemented an overarching continuous improvement framework known as the R.I.S.E.R model (Research, Implement, Study, Evaluate, and Revise) developed by Dr. Scott Ebbrecht (personal communication, December 4, 2007) to move the building out of our present analysis paralysis situation. The leadership team has researched, and will implement, study, evaluate and reflect on data through a cyclical process. Professional learning communities within the school building will focus on vision, mission, goals, collaboration, and professional development along with leadership, guidance, and support. With the complimentary pieces from collaborative teams working together throughout this action research process, targeted student learning goals will be reached.

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NSDC Learning School Alliance
By Sherri Houghton
Improving professional practice, increasing student achievement.

NSDC has recently announced the formation of the Learning School Alliance, which will be a network of 100 model schools, committed to professional development practices that promote student achievement.  The goal is to select two schools from each of the 50 states. The educators from these 100 schools will support one another in applying the principles and standards of professional development grounded in NSDC's definition of professional learning, its standards for staff development, and its principles for professional learning identified in The Learning Educator: A New Era for Professional Learning.

We need schools for Ohio to submit applications for membership.  Please consider this opportunity and learn more at www.NSDC.org.  The Staff Development Council of Ohio will be available to help support schools selected for this great opportunity!

Tarnished Brand Could Use Polish
By Hayes Mizell
Reprinted from JSD, Spring 2009, Vol. 30, No. 2

Following last year's presidential election, many observers opined that the losing national political party had become a "tarnished brand." Even some party leaders were critical. They attributed the party's electoral defeats to the incumbent administration that had not been faithful to the party traditional brand of limited government and spending.

The concept of branding has become increasingly important in our culture. According to Wikipedia, a brand is "a symbolic embodiment to create associations and expectations among products made by a producer." Businesses and organizations devote a lot of time and money to creating a brand that will inspire confidence and loyalty among customers and constituents. But branding is not simply creating a compelling logo or a clever advertising campaign. For a brand to be successful, the product associated with it must be useful and reliable over time.
To read the rest of the article, click here.

Book Review: Tools for Promoting Active, In-Depth Learning
By Jennifer Webb
Jennifer is a language arts teacher at Waggoner Road Junior High School in Reynoldsburg, Ohio.

Have you ever faced the challenge of students falling short in "the student engagement" category? Well, do I have a book for you! Tools for Promoting Active, In- Depth Learning by Harvey Silver [Thoughtful Education Press, 2nd Edition, 2001] provides the essential tools that we can utilize as educators to fully engage our students in learning.

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Professional Development in the News: Summaries of Articles and Links
Submitted By Kellie Hayden
SDCO Board and Newsletter Coordinator
Hayes MIzell selects these for PD in the News for the National Staff Development Council. These are summaries of the summaries with links.

• Professional Learning in the Learning Profession: A Status Report on Teacher Development in the United States and Abroad Linda Darling-Hammond led the research team for the School Redesign Network at Stanford University and the National Staff Development Council.  The team reported "nearly half of all U.S. teachers are dissatisfied with their opportunities for professional development." High school teachers were more dissatisfied than elementary teachers.  For the complete article, click here.
• Reading Levels Soar at Low-Decile Schools Professor Stuart McNaughton from the University of Auckland's Faculty of Education reports that in years 4-8 students reading at the national average or above increased 40-70 percent by teaching teachers how "to use student achievement data and evidence from their own teaching to monitor and improve both their teaching and pupil learning." For more information, click here.
• Tug of War Over Classroom Time Officials in southern Iowa want to give teachers every other Monday off next fall to help teachers produce better students because research shows that professional development can led to better teaching. However,  "Efforts to give teachers more time away from students have stalled in Des Moines and Waukee amid complaints of shortchanging children." For the complete article, click here.
• Teachers Take Charge of School Improvement Julia Steiny shows how the Westerly School Department  allows the teachers to choose their professional development instead of the administrators.  Four times a year the teachers are given substitutes so that they can focus on learning together.  For the complete article, click here.
• Professional Development Key to Improving Math Achievement "Teachers have a greater impact than new textbooks or computers when it comes to raising math scores, according to a comprehensive research review by the Johns Hopkins University School of Education's Center for Data-Driven Reform In Education." The research showed that students achieved more when teachers changed their daily teaching practices more than when the teachers used new textbooks or computers.  For the complete research, please click here or to the center.

Teaching & Learning Center
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