Create a 'Learning System'

This was the by far the easiest article to post onto my Middle School Learning blog since it documents teachers in the Social Studies Department at Jonas Clarke Middle School in Lexington, Massachusetts. In full disclosure of my bias, I am the Social Studies Department chair at this school.

Ed Week recently published an article on November 10, 2010 focusing upon the effective use of professional development at Lexington Public Schools to create a 'learning system'. The goals of the professional development program are to provide high quality, relevant and accessible training for educators in the district. The article addressed the implementation of PLCs as instrumental in building a collaborative focus at Lexington Public Schools.

Teachers across the district have been provided with common planning time for content teams or by grade-level teams. This collaborative focus in building teacher capacity to improve student achievement by creating and using common assessments using data-driven decision making to improve instruction.

The Ed Week article provided an example of this collaboration in the Social Studies Department, "At Jonas Clarke Middle School, for instance, the three members of the 8th grade U.S. history content team used their collaboration time to craft a unit on the 2008 presidential election, after realizing that many students didn't understand the distinction between a Republican and the political concept of republicanism." (Ed Week, 11/10/10)

The entire Ed Week article titled "Mass. District Strives for Teacher Learning System" is available online at the following link: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/11/10/11pd_local.h30.html