‘Late start’ should help teachers plan

To understand what’s going on in Sisters schools today, you need to know three key terms: standards-based education, professional learning community and collaborative work.

Those labels apply to the concepts underlying what might appear to be just a simple change in schedule, the shift to “late-start Wednesdays.” The high school introduced late-start Wednesdays four years ago. At its last meeting, May 10, the school board approved a similar change for the middle and elementary schools.

So the high school starts 90 minutes later than normal on Wednesdays and beginning next year the other two schools will start an hour later. What’s the big deal?

The deal is a hope for causal connections, a hope that over time the extra time for teachers on Wednesdays will create a professional learning community which in turn will help the district move toward standards-based education. This is how Superintendent Ted Thonstad put it at the board meeting:

“My primary recommendation…is the implementation of standards-based education using the professional learning community (PLC) model and requiring regular and sustained collaborative work time for teachers and administrators. The goal will be to answer the following four questions: 1. What do we want students to learn? 2. How will we know when they have learned it? 3. What will we do when they have not learned it? 4. What will we do if they already know it?”

Pursuing this goal will result in “continuous improvement in the curriculum, instruction, and learning by students and staff as the elementary and middle schools follow the lead of the high school in becoming a professional learning community,” Thonstad said.

He gave credit to “the visionary leadership of Principal Bob Macauley” in helping the high school make significant progress toward “both becoming a PLC and developing standards and options in response to the four questions.” However, he added, “it is the late-start Wednesdays that have provided the regular and sustained collaborative time so that the staff could do the required work.”

Thonstad made this discussion the centerpiece of a written response to his annual evaluation by the board, received March 27 (see The Nugget, April 5). Board members commended his elaborate and detailed response and unanimously approved the late-start Wednesdays plan.

The superintendent explained after the meeting that the professional learning community model is one of two or three that have gained favor among educators across the nation in recent years as ways to promote the continuous improvement of schools. He attached a numbered list of points supporting the use of this model and the shift to late-start Wednesdays to his written statement to the board. They included:

“The research on…school improvement strongly supports collaboration as the primary means of learning and (emphasizes) the need to provide teachers with time to collaborate as one of the key ingredients…

“For example, if one of our high priority goals is to align the curriculum both horizontally and vertically — and it is one of my high priority goals — then we need to provide the teachers with regular blocks of time to do this work.

“Although not much time has been spent on the details, the majority of the staff at both the elementary and middle schools supports late-start Wednesdays as the source of collaborative work time necessary to do this work and begin the adventure of becoming a learning community.

“Our neighbors in Bend and I believe Redmond and Crook County as well as numerous other districts in the state have either adopted or are in the process of adopting some form of late start or early release in order to provide teachers with the collaborative work time necessary to plan, do curriculum work, and participate in staff development. The fact is that a day here or there throughout the year just does not get it done.”

Thonstad also added this note: “Learning communities is neither a new idea for me nor is it my effort to promote the latest educational fad. My own study of learning organizations or communities began in the fall of 1999 and has been a continual process during my work both prior to and since becoming a school administrator. Creating and maintaining learning communities is not with difficulty and it requires an ongoing effort and commitment over a lengthy period of time — probably five years. The good news is that other school districts have been involved in this effort for five years and longer and the results indicate that it works.”