Published: January 26, 2009 07:42 am      

Coming together

Teachers build relationships through learning communities

SUMMIT — The 40 minutes they spend together every Friday morning may be the most important in the week for the eight teachers sitting around a conference table — and there’s not a single student in the room.

The teachers are assembling a list of skills they’ll stress next week. Sharing their observations about the strengths and weaknesses of their students, and their own teaching priorities, they hammer out the list with minutes to spare.

It’s the weekly meeting of first-grade teachers at Summit Elementary. They and all the teachers in the Boyd County School District are organized into professional learning communities, a new initiative this year.

Professional learning communities are more than just teams of teachers. Once they are grouped together, the teachers form a bond that is both professional and personal.

Working together, teachers are better able to develop common standards and practices for their classrooms and share the best instructional techniques. They also can identify students who are struggling in a subject and group them for review sessions.

Further, they do so in an atmosphere of trust, said Larry Kobel, one of the first-grade teachers. The trust is a product of their close collaboration. Frequent e-mails and one-on-one discussions supplement their weekly meetings.

As a community, teachers can work together to meet their students’ needs, said Jennifer Miller, another of the first-grade teachers. Part of that is agreeing on what those needs are.

For special education teachers like Julie Edwards, being part of a community helps her keep up with what students in the mainstream classes are learning. That way, she said, she is better able to identify gaps between those students and hers.

Some regular classroom activities stem directly from the community concept. Daily review sessions, called flashbacks, reinforce what students have been studying.

Each flashback includes a question or exercise on a key concept for each subject. The teachers rotate the task of coming up with the questions and exercises. It’s a way of maximizing each teacher’s expertise, Kobel said.

Another exercise, the math marathon, reviews math concepts students have been struggling with. The community structure allows teachers to identify students struggling with a particular concept — this past Friday it was story problems — and group them together for review.

The community concept works all the way through high school, said Rhonda Salisbury, principal of Boyd County High School. At her school, the constant collaboration has led to common assessments and course outlines and standardized the rigor of coursework.

The standardization leads to better teaching, but it has an immediate practical value, too. Salisbury said it stops students from shopping around for the easier classes.

Enthusiasm for the communities is high at Summit, said Janice Marcum, a third-grade teacher who has been at the school for four of her five years in teaching. “It gives us the freedom to work together and utilize each other’s strengths.”

MIKE JAMES can be reached at mjames@dailyindependent.com or at (606) 326-2652.