What began as an idea in January turned into a program
called “SMART Math” that is transforming the way we integrate technology in
classroom practice in Salem-Keizer Public Schools. This is the first of several
blogs where I will outline how we started, where we are now, what the plans are
for the near and far future, and the use of the content as we move forward.
A picture of the need
In an informal survey of classrooms in our district (41,000
students/2,500 staff), we discovered that we had more interactive whiteboards
and less quality use of them than we originally believed. Our SMART Vendor – Bob Friedler from
Compview, an Educational Specialist from SMART – Robert Pohl, and I spent three
days visiting schools that I knew had boards.
In some cases, I went to a school expecting to see one or two boards and
found that their parent group had completely outfitted every classroom with a
SMART board. In other cases, the board
was in the library and, due to staffing cuts in the last couple years, they
were sitting unused.
One other thing that surprised me is that teachers from
several schools indicated that they would, if they could be sure they would
have content for their classroom, spend their own time developing instructional
materials on their own time. This last
year was a time where our teachers were feeling stretched past their breaking
point with bigger class sizes, less prep time, and increased responsibilities. Every other time that I had suggested doing
something that I knew to be good practice, I had a difficult time getting
teachers to participate because they legitimately didn’t have space in their
lives for one more thing. Their
willingness was a welcome surprise.
Conceiving the idea
In our wrap-up discussion, Bob, Robert and I talked about
what we could do to move technology integration forward in the District given
the feedback from teachers and instructional leaders. Two ideas emerged: SMART School – a redesign of the way we
deliver SMART training (see previous post) and the idea of creating
instructional materials using SMART Notebook.
I quickly identified math as the content that we could
impact most quickly. This was based on
two primary factors: First, two of our
recent Title IID competitive grants focused on math so I had a core group of
teachers I knew could move easily into creating quality instructional
materials. Second, the Math Specialists
in our Curriculum department were uniquely suited to taking this next
step. They have a good grasp of the
Common Core State Standards and have a working transition plan already in
place. There are three of them for the
district, something no other subject area currently has. And they have gone deep in their work with
our staff on Mathematical Discourse, something we wanted to be sure to
implement in the instructional materials we created.
Creating the
structure and finding funding
An important first step was getting both approval and support
from the Curriculum Director, Sue Rieke-Smith.
We agreed that math was the appropriate subject area with which to
start. She asked me to coordinate
further with the Math Specialists.
During the next month, the Math Specialists and I, along
with help from Robert and others, created the structure and set our goals for
the materials. We wanted teachers to
focus on the launch and summarize parts of the lesson as well as to create
engaging materials that include prompts for mathematical discourse.
We set the schedule (one Saturday in May and 4 days the week
after school was out), published a flyer and application on Edmodo (http://bit.ly/AboutSMARTMath2012),
and announced the opportunity in both our internal District newsletter and the
standard communications with our instructional leaders. We asked teachers to apply both to determine
the interest level at each grade and to give ourselves the opportunity to
balance the grade level teams with math and SMART Notebook expertise.
Next up…
The next blog post will focus on how we structured our time
together and arrived at our final expectations.
