Putting the Puzzle Together | Professional Development

Putting the Puzzle Together: Curriculum Reform and Professional Development
Warm Springs students

When Smith describes the thorny process she and her staff undertook to create a unified curriculum, it sounds a lot like a bunch of people trying to put together one of those giant landscape puzzles. The tiny pieces were laid out on the table, and the eager players gathered around. They had a vision of what the final product should look like, but the challenge was fitting the pieces together to make a coherent big picture. Smith cut whole-staff meetings to once a month and organized grade-level teams to meet the other three weeks. Each team was charged with developing language arts and math curricula. Then the entire staff came together to make sure each grade-level curriculum was thorough, systemic, and met district and state goals.

"Dawn has a gift for identifying talent in her teachers and matching that talent to the job that needs to be done," says Johnson. "She found the people on her staff who are natural curriculum writers and who could get down to the core of what needs to be taught at what grade level, and in what order. This school does more in curriculum development than any school I know in terms of teachers knowing what they're supposed to be teaching and how to teach it."

According to her staff, Principal Smith also has a particular talent for promoting creative professional development. "I've never been in a school like this, where everyone is encouraged to go out and gather information and bring it back to share," says Varela. "It's not an attitude of 'we'll try anything,' but if you can show her research, or a rationale, or at least some good example of others who have tried it, she's willing to send us for training or bring training here."

Varela gives a good example of a staff-initiated innovation. "My first year here, the average first-grade reading score was 17 percent. So the kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade teachers formed an action research team and got money from a state department grant to hire a reading consultant. Darla Wood Walters, who lives in Bend but is from New Zealand, came to the school and trained the K-2 teachers in a reading and writing technique we call the New Zealand method. The next year the program went schoolwide. It was exciting that agreed to try it."

Varela was so inspired by the success of the method that she paid her own way to New Zealand to see the program firsthand. Last year the reading scores for Warm Springs first-graders had climbed to the 40th percentile.

Other professional development initiatives unique to Warm Springs include inservice training for new teachers by tribal members on the history, infrastructure, and customs of the tribe, such as those around death and grieving. All Warm Springs staff are encouraged to take advantage of native language classes offered by a tribal Culture and Heritage Department.

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