Summer learning . . .

Summer is here! Sun and hot weather, it was simply a wonderful day in this unbelievably beautiful part of our country. And, on this day what did I see in our board room? Thirty plus teachers learning about this thing called GLAD. I took the picture below at about 2:30 this afternoon and people were still engaged. On earlier posts I have shared my amazement with how this instructional model has taken hold. That was reinforced today.

Below, are sections from a comment on my May 12th post from Susan Noonan, one of our first grade teachers.

I have never attended another training in my 14 years of teaching to which I have responded so immediately, yet at the same time sustained that response over time.

This has also required me to "dig deeper" into the material I am teaching. Many is the morning that my first-grade teammate and I greeted each other with, "You'll never guess what I learned about sea horses last night" or "Did you know that...?" I found my enthusiasm for the information I was teaching was contagious and students responded to that excitement.I am excited to take refresher courses this summer and get all the materials prepared this summer to teach the material from all three first-grade integrated units with the GLAD approach.

From Vanessa on that same post.

I have also heard from parents of students that have a GLAD trained teacher, and they have commented on their child’s burst of enthusiasm for school and their child’s use of high level curriculum vocabulary.

Words I would use to describe GLAD: engaging, powerful, active, multi-sensory, energizing, and effective.

With this summer’s training we will have over fifty elementary staff members trained in this program and using the strategies in their classrooms. Will this become a problem in our system? Will parents now begin to request teachers who have had the training and integrated the strategies into their teaching? Will teachers only partner with those that have taken the training?

If you had the responsibility to lead a team tasked with making a recommendation for the future of GLAD in our system, how would you proceed? Who would you need to include on your team? What criteria would you identify to base your decision and recommendation? What data would you want to collect before making the decision? What would you need to see and hear before making the recommendation? How much time would you spend studying, collecting and analyzing data before you would be ready to make the recommendation?

This is the situation we are now in and how and what we do as a system in the future will have a significant influence on our schools, on teams of teachers, and on individual teachers. How to proceed?