Sustaining Training & Support
David Lassner (david@hula.its.hawaii.edu)
Wed, 19 Mar 1997 18:41:23 -1000
I'm going to followup on some of Ann's comments, but in separate messages
so that they can be threaded properly in the HyperMail archives at:
http://www.info-ren.org/projects/conference/archive/sustain
On Tue, 18 Mar 1997, Ann Adjutant wrote:
> "There will never be adequate technical support for schools, so teachers
> must learn to support themselves with the help of their students."
>
> **The Community of Learners has had a very agressive staff development
> program. We have two and three hour training sessions on various aspects -
> basic e-mail, HTML, advanced Eudora, for example. In addition one of the
> staff developers spent time in each school last fall acting as a resource
> when teachers could find time to meet with him. Because the state of Maine
> has money from a rate case with the telephone company, a plan was devised to
> train 2 people in each school building in some basic skills to help teachers
> in their building with telecommunications. We have been able to reduce our
> need to be in the individual school building by using these people trained
> by the state program. By shifting that piece to the schools we have put our
> efforts into working with teams of teachers (2-3) in each building. Each
> team of teachers is working on a project to integrate the technology with a
> piece of current classroom curriculum.
>
> The administrators have recognized the importance of staff development in
> the process of building a telecommunications network and see the need to
> support a person in that capacity after the grant is gone. How did we get
> the administration on board??? We had training sessions designed just for
> school board members and administrators.
This sounds excellent Ann! We've also been trying to establish small
communities within the schools and complexes (a high school and the
intermediate/elementary schools which feed it), and then weave these
groups into a statewide community of learners and resource people. A few
of our key strategies have been:
Blur the boundaries between teachers and learners. At most of our
events, most of the participants also have some kind of facilitation
role. E.g. the teachers who want to learn to use PageMill may be teaching
the sessions on Project Mgmt. We even use kids as teachers to drive the
point home more directly.
Help the community understand the bureaucracy so they can set up their own
learning environments. As our project, HERN, winds down we're asking our
prior years' participants to become increasingly involved in setting up
and managing the training enterprise. As CAUSE says: professional
development is everybody's business.
We've still had a lot of trouble developing an wide-open forum that is
actively used by people seeking answers and advice, but to the extent the
forum (a listproc) is used it is greatly appreciated.