"When teachers have a strong sense of professional community their morale is better and teacher commitment is higher. Professional community helps support teaching practices, and helps teachers address the uncertainty that accompanies nonroutine teaching of the sort encouraged by many school reform initiatives."
Adam Gamoran

It is often said that the most important asset of any enterprise is the talent and enthusiasm of its workforce. Education is no exception to this premise.
Being teachers such a vital element in the educational process, when designing policies aimed at getting better academic results, what policymakers must not forget is that teachers are no different from employees in the private sector. They want to succeed in their jobs and they demand the tools, the respect, and the sense of empowerment necessary to reach this goal.
As University of Washington scholar Dan Goldhaber stands, "It appears that the most important thing a school can do, is to provide its students with good teachers".
But teachers are known to improve when they analyze, evaluate, and experiment with colleagues in purposeful learning communities (Fullan, 2001). Fullan also suggests that the school level change strategy is developing professional learning community within schools and emphasize the importance of strong teacher community. Therefore, teachers need to be enabled and encouraged to establish a community of learners among themselves (Lave & Wegner, 1991). Maclaughlin and Talbert (2001) also indicated that a collaborative community of practice in which teachers share instructional resources and reflections in practice appear essential to their persistence and success in innovating classroom practices (p.22).
Building up organizations that are able to learn – according to Kofman and Senge- requires basic changes in the ways people think and interact. “The heart of the learning organizations are communities of commitment. Without communities of people genuinely committed to the organizations’ goals, there is no real change”.

ARTIGAS, URUGUAY

"Shapers" 2007: the net is officially born

"Shapers" 2007: the net is officially born

NEW MESSAGE. CHECK IT OUT!


lunes, 28 de septiembre de 2009

Being flexible, being eager to share and being open minded: Three rules for success

Last 25th September I was part of a great Sala in Artigas. It was hard to get started at the beginning as some of the supervisors hadn't arrived but the positive side of things is that we were capable of rearranging everything and sharing with colleagues from Idioma Español what we had to share.
There were some milestones in the presentation. One of them was the moment in which the high school students were teaching them how to use the xos. The teachers forgot about their daily worries, their anxieties and the fact that they are digital immigrants or dinosaurs!!!
The second highlighted moment was when I worked with a power point presentation and the Spanish teachers paired with an English teacher so that they could understand. It was a real example of peer work, peer assessment and all the collocations we can make with the word peer.
In the afternoon we worked with teachers of English only, it is a pitty that there are teachers that missed the opportunity to keep on learning but those who were wise enough to attend enjoyed the fun, the creativity and above all the things shared.
As usual, Beatriz and all the teachers that work as a team there created not only a good atmosphere but also a worth attending sala.

Prof. Aldo Rodríguez
P.A.D. Salto-Paysandú



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