Parkway Introduces Late Arrival Days
For the 2012-2013 school year, the Parkway School District will replace two Friday professional development days, with eight 2 hour late start days, the first Wednesday of every month, which will allow for teachers to have meetings called a Professional Learning Community, also known as a PLC.
“A Professional Learning Community is a group of staff members, usually teachers, who use data and curriculum analysis of instructional practice to determine how best to meet the needs of students,” said Principal Dr. Jenny Marquart.
At North, teachers will be meeting as a department to improve the curriculum.
During a PLC, teachers look at common assessments, common assignments. “We not only created those assignments together, but we normed them,” said English teacher Melissa Lynn Pomerantz.
The reason for the late start days is so these PLC’s can happen on a monthly basis. In addition to the eight days set aside by the district, Parkway North will have four early release days for additional meetings.
According to the Parkway School District website, “Under the PLC model, time for professional learning is more frequent and consistent. Rather than full days of school and district meetings, the focus is on groups of teachers reviewing individual student achievement data, identifying students who need extra help or more challenging work, investigating better teaching practices to help all students, and planning future instruction.”
Currently on early release days, students go to their 5th block, their 7th block, and their 8th block, skipping academic lab during 6th block. However, on late start days, there still will be four blocks.
‘All students will arrive two hours later and we will create a shortened schedule from 9:35 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., which will still include four blocks,” said Marquart, who said each block will be about 65 minutes.
Under this new structure for teacher meetings, teachers will be able to meet more frequently, so they can meet the needs of the students.
“We learn so much from each other,” said Pomerantz. “The way schools are, we don’t get to teach with other people and see what they do in their classrooms. This way we are sharing so we can learn from each other.”
Written by Brandon Fredman