Transcript
Mary Russo, Principal (1990-6) of the Samuel Mason Elementary School in Roxbury, MA, comments on getting started with an effective professional development plan.
Well, the word "scale-up" without question is, I mean, every school in the country has its excellent teachers, its few excellent teachers. And the issue in our school became how do we scale up so that there's excellent teaching in all classrooms for all students. And within the Boston Public Schools, it's how do we scale up so that more schools are engaged in doing this.
The issue of scale-up for us, I almost think of it as, the word I'm going to use is a word that's not really used in education much, but it's the word "benchmarking," and benchmarking is a verb. In our school we didn't call it that at the time we were doing it, which would be the early and mid '90's, but that's exactly what it was.
It was going -- asking ourselves a set of key, critical questions, saying, for example, what do kids who are excellent, what do kids who are excellent readers and writers look like. What are they able to do. What should their work look like. And then asking ourselves, where are people doing the best job of teaching kids to read and write well.
And then we called it "site visits" but we went out and visited schools that were doing a good job, where most of the kids were learning to read and write on grade level. And thought about -- you know, some of them were in suburban school systems that had far more resources than we did, and different population of kids than we had. So we had to ask ourselves, what's the essence of that, what's the core that makes this successful.
For example, in one of the suburban school systems, we saw two teachers in every classroom, and so people said, well, we can't afford two teachers in every classroom in our school. But the essence of that is that kids are getting more attention. So what can we bring back to our school that will help us to do that kind of thing.
Or we felt that those were the good conditions for teacher learning. So I would say it was benchmarking. That is the ability to go to find the essence of something that's successful, to bring it back and to ask again. Another set of critical questions - what's the best fit, you know. Is this going to work. What are the adaptations that have to be made for it to work here.
| Excerpt from an interview conducted at the NPEAT National Conference, April 1999 |
Contact Information:
Mary Russo
Principal
Richard J. Murphy Elementary School
1 Worrell Street, Boston, MA 02122
617-635-8781
Fax: 617-635-8787
russo@infl.com
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