MONTEREY — With California schools gradually making the transition to using Common Core Standards, there have been plenty of opportunities for teachers to receive professional development and training.
But not like the one to be offered through the Instructional Leadership Corps, supporters say.
The California Teachers Association, in collaboration with Stanford University experts, has launched a three-year project to provide professional learning opportunities to teachers throughout the state. The Instructional Leadership Corps will feature a team of veteran teachers who will assist their peers as they develop materials and strategies needed to teach Common Core Standards.
It’s a project that a top union leader says addresses the organization’s desire to support a good learning environment for students.
“For as long as we’ve been talking about student learning we’ve been saying (that) creating and sustaining a learning environment for kids should be our primary responsibility,” said Dean Vogel, president of the California Teachers Association. “All of the sudden the stars are lining up. … It’s a focus on teacher quality and the dynamics of teaching and learning and everyone wins, especially students.”
About 600 teachers statewide applied to be part of the Instructional Leadership Corps, and only 150 were accepted. They’ve already received a two-day training in Los Angeles, and they have been told to return to their districts to train their peers.
“We have not seen this type of professional development in California” in more than a decade, said Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford. “The type of drive-by workshops that bring experts from the outside and PowerPoint presentations does not work, it does not change teaching practices. We know professional development approaches that dramatically improve and those are approaches where teachers work with other teachers in a collegial way.”
The project’s goal is to reach about 50,000 students in the next three years, and to create the conditions needed at each school to foster continuous professional development so all teachers can connect instruction to the learning expectations of the Common Core.
One of the things that’s different about the Instructional Leadership Corps is the scope of resources available to teachers, said Mary Greenfield, an English teacher at Walter Colton Middle School in Monterey.
“The actual training in the Common Core was less strenuous than what I’ve gone through,” at the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District, Greenfield said. “But it’s the resources that are available and the development of a common, statewide vision for the kinds of trainings that teachers should have to be able to move forward to Common Core. As far as MPUSD, we’ve been there, done those trainings. But that does not mean everyone at the state is at the same level. Having a common vision across the state of what the basics of Common Core look like is the most valuable piece.”
For Greg Ludwa, who teaches math and fine arts to incarcerated youth through the Monterey County Office of Education, the most important part of belonging to the Instructional Leadership Corps is that it will be teachers supporting teachers.
“We’re involved with students every day and we see what students’ needs are,” he said. The training provided by districts are by “professionals who have been out of the classroom for 18 years. My advantage is that I’ve been teaching for 29 years. I’ve been teaching before the content standards came in. … Now the power has shifted back to the classroom, to the needs of the teacher and the needs of the students. That’s where the real strength comes in. Our students are not ready for the demands the Common Core is making of them, especially high school students. They don’t have critical thinking skills the Common Core is requiring. That will take a whole generation, when we get the second, third and fourth graders we’ll be seeing the benefits of what the Common Core will do.”
The Instructional Leadership Corps will have its first countywide training on Jan. 10 at the Monterey County Office of Education. Invitations will go out soon, Ludwa said.
