PRINCE EDWARD — County school board members were presented with a detailed report of professional development efforts at their December meeting, but some questioned whether it’s improving student performance.

The professional development plan, noted Division Superintendent Dr. David Smith, was a follow up to a question from the previous board meeting about targeted professional development to address identified needs.

“This plan is not brand new in the last month,” detailed Dr. Smith. “This has been an ongoing development over time and the consultants—reading and English and math, specifically—we’ve used for more than a couple of years and teachers have really liked working with them.”

“But is it working?” asked school board member Dr. Timothy Corbett.

He would follow, “Are we going into the building and asking our administrators what do they think about this plan and where the administrators are with it and is it working. Are…the building administrators content with this plan? Are the building administrators grasping this plan? Are they pushing this plan? Are they behind you with this plan? I mean, I just want to know that.”

The detailed effort for professional development is aimed at helping teachers to meet identified needs in the classroom. Prince Edward has struggled to meet accreditation. The elementary school, though no longer a Focus School (in the bottom ten percent of Title I schools in the state), is accredited with warning at the state level; the middle school is accredited with warning, but has been deemed a Focus School; and the high school was within one three-year average in one statistical category of being fully state accredited. They, too, are accredited with warning at the state level.

County supervisors are scheduled to meet with the school board January 13 to discuss SOL performance.

“…We have a comprehensive professional development framework which is designed to give teachers and administrators the skills, knowledge and strategies to help all students be successful academically. And these professional development workshops specifically target the areas of need, which are identified by analyzing data and our highest priority is increasing student achievement in reading and math and so our professional development especially targets those areas,” detailed Executive Director of Curriculum and Instruction Laura Williamson.

Teacher workdays, specifically, sprinkled throughout the school year, include time for professional development. In addition, it was noted, there are numerous workshops after school, on Saturdays or in the summer to provide training for teachers.

A written report in the school board packet explained that targeted, ongoing and embedded professional development is being delivered to each school to provide support for division initiatives in reading, math, that they are supported in math instruction by university instructors, math workshops, region eight math assessment writing workshops and workshops in unwrapping the standards and critical thinking. Additionally, there are K-12 vertical team meetings in English, math, science and social science that are part of professional development and that five workshop series are provided for teachers in all content areas to support implementation of problem-based learning and that the division and administrators participate in a year-long professional development series on alignment of the written, taught and tested curriculum.

“Over time, the effect—teachers do buy into it. There are always some employees in any given employee group who will say…‘I don’t want to go to another training,’ but all of this is targeted specifically at the areas of need in increasing student achievement,” Dr. Smith said.

The topic of problem-based learning, where students learn about a subject through problem solving, fueled additional questions. It’s interdisciplinary, inquiry-based instruction, Dr. Smith said. The way the SOLs are being redesigned and SOL assessments have changed, that is what it is going to take to have success on the SOLs.

They are moving drastically away, he offered, on rote memorization and drill in classes. What they’re finding is that they are filling the role of high education by providing the training.

“We should be able to see a change in our AMOs as a result of this,” Dr. Corbett stated, noting that they’ve been doing it for two years now and should be able to show some type of change, some type of data that shows its working.

“None of these are, by themselves, the answer,” Williamson said at one point in the discussion. “They are all important parts.”

If something’s not working, Dr. Corbett said, he would like for administrators to be able to point that out to them to make some corrections in the curriculum and fix it.

Principals, Williamson assured are “intimately involved” in selecting the topics and what they will do in each of the sessions.

“This has been an ongoing development of a plan…It’s modified continually as the need changes, based on feedback from teachers, based on feedback from administrators and based on success,” Dr. Smith said.

Dr. Corbett pressed for data to demonstrate progress prior to the SOLs. Board member Beulah Womack also asked about growth over time, asking why they should continue the mode. She asked if there is an internal way to measure academic growth of students.

Dr. Smith agreed that there are some measurable objectives, and noted that they started using measure of academic progress—a test given at the beginning, middle and end of the year. It has been an effective measure of student achievement, he said. It replaced benchmark tests given every six weeks. (It was taking an enormous amount of instructional time to administer test, he said.)

That data is expected to be presented to the school board.

Still, Dove pointed out they had that information when they were testing every six weeks.

“We’re looking at what we’re putting on the teachers, but are we doing our children a disservice by doing that?” Dr. Corbett said.

Dove followed up that when they were looking at those scores, “a lot of times they didn’t correlate into the final scores.” Interim assessments didn’t correlate into the final SOLs, he said.

Womack offered that it does give an indication of how well students are doing. What they need to do as a board and superintendent is show the kind of growth that correlates into the SOLs.

Dr. Corbett said that they did well when Cambridge was there (assisting the high school as a turnaround partner) and had concerns they may end up where they were before.

“We all share the concern,” Dr. Smith said.