Monthly Updates

March 2006 Uniontown Area School District We were delighted to spend so much time in Uniontown in March to become better acquainted with administrators, principals, faculty, staff, and students. Each day brought new knowledge, new opportunities for collaboration, and even some challenges. At the start of the month three Project sites were selected—Lafayette School, Menallen School, and Ben Franklin School. Dr. Zigmond, Eileen, Kathy and we enjoyed discussing the details of implementing the progress monitoring model in the 3 elementary schools with the principals, the district’s Curriculum Coordinator, Reading Recovery Coordinator, and Director of Special Education. While all attendees were enthusiastic about improving their capacity to teach reading well and increasing their students’ reading achievement, some valid concerns arose such as: how implementation of the model would impact teachers’ responsibilities and time, how the design of the model would mirror and contrast current instructional practices, general uneasiness about the one-on-one assessments detracting from instructional time, and the eventual impact of frequent teacher turn-over and student transience on Project outcomes. To carefully reflect on these concerns, our project staff decided to incorporate discussions on each into upcoming professional development meetings at the 3 elementary schools. Overall, the spirit of the meeting was one of shared problem solving, mutual learning, and collaboration. We would like to thank the schools’ principals and administrative staff for their full-support of Project MP3. While Kathy and I worked on developing the introductory professional development meetings for LaFayette, Menallen, and Ben Franklin teachers, Eileen became more familiar with the schools’ structure, curriculum, resources, and instructional practices by interviewing principals, assistant principals, and district administrators. We were also excited to be a part of the kindergarten screening days to collect valuable baseline data on incoming kindergarten students. We wrapped up the month by spending a few hours with K-4 classroom teachers, learning support teachers, reading recovery specialists and Title One teachers discussing the ins and outs of Project MP3 in their classrooms. All teachers were enthusiastic about taking advantage of the expertise, resources, and professional development opportunities extended to them by Pitt and PaTTAN and were passionately and genuinely committed to improving their students’ reading abilities. Dr. Zigmond expressed our interest in learning more from them about current practices, building on existing effective strategies, and helping them to explore new strategies to help students show and maintain reading progress. It was wonderful to see so many teachers open to these possibilities. April is sure to be just as informational and just as busy! We look forward to visiting classrooms and planning for the Spring Benchmark assessments. Amanda Kloo - Project Coordinator, University of Pittsburgh Back to Monthly Updates Main Page