Perhaps the best way to ensure that the state has quality teachers is to develop them — continually. That is the idea behind the Rhode Island Teaching and Learning Center, which has been established in Coventry.
The state Department of Education announced last month an award of $300,569 to Coventry Public Schools, including $155,000 of state funds and $145,000 of federal funds through the Teacher Quality Enhancement Program.
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The Teaching and Learning Center, according to the state Department of Education, “will build upon Coventry’s successful record of collaborative leadership and delivery of professional development to provide high-quality services to educators throughout Rhode Island”
A policy board, which governs the Teaching and Learning Center, is meeting to design participation guidelines and program content. Coventry will serve as the base for the center, but activities, meetings, and events will take place throughout the state.
The center will allow teachers to learn from and teach one another. It will provide a core of training in areas such as the Rhode Island Beginning Teacher Standards, literacy and mathematics, standards-based instruction, the analysis of student work, data-driven decision making, family partnerships, and the technologies needed to support such efforts.
The center’s real strength, according to the state Department of Education, is in its “ability to draw upon a wide array of expertise from higher education, unions, educators, the state, model programs and school districts, professional organizations, and teachers and administrators from throughout the state.
It will also “provide an opportunity for teachers to have a voice in designing professional development and implementing instructional change.”
Kathleen A. Swann is the center’s director. She describes teaching as an ever-changing profession, one in which professional development is critical. Swann sees teachers learning from other teachers as an invaluable experience.
“Teaching others helps you learn yourself,” said Swann. “It is the strongest kind of learning. You never fully learn how to teach. Everyone can get better. We have learned so much in the past 10 years as to how people learn. We can’t teach the way we always did – teachers realize that.”
Swann credited the state for stepping forward to fund such initiatives. The key, she said, is making sure the benefits of such initiatives make their way to the classroom.
The center has four goals to support the state’s agenda to increase capacity to promote research-based professional development for improved student learning:
To develop a process for communicating state educational reform initiatives to educators and translating those initiatives into improved student learning.
To build a common core of professional development that is embedded within each school’s daily practice.
To support exemplary professional development programs and facilitate the implementation of promising innovative professional development.
To establish a network of resources within and outside the state that sustains long and short-term professional development based upon Rhode Island educational reform.
National Board Certification
The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is an organization of teachers and other education stakeholders working to advance the teaching profession.
To achieve certification by the NBPTS, teachers voluntarily complete a year-long set of activities created to help them critically examine their practices against those standards. The National Board Certification process is seen as a “powerful catalyst” for a teacher’s professional growth. Achieving National Board Certification is recognition of exemplary teaching as measured against national standards.
An NBPTS certificate is a credential that attests that peers have assessed a teacher as “one who is accomplished, makes sound professional judgments about student learning and acts effectively on those judgments.”
The Rhode Island National Board Certification Initiative is a statewide program designed to involve teachers and school districts in the National Board Certification process. The initiative provides funding and support for teachers as they pursue National Board Certification. The National Board recognized Rhode Island this summer as the state having the most comprehensive support program for National Board Certification in the country.
(For information about the Rhode Island Teaching and Learning Center contact Swann, at 822-9400. Information about national Board activity across the country is available at the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards Web site, www.nbpts.org. )
