Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/575770
Back To School 2015 | WEAnews 8 Your WEA At Work WEA Brings Cutting-Edge PD to Wyoming With so much focus nationwide on teacher accountability, especially as measured by student achievement or growth, the Wyoming Education Association wanted to get out in front of the issue and provide high- quality professional development to Wyoming teachers on the use of Student Learning Objectives (SLOs). WEA President Kathy Vetter and the presidents of affiliates in eight other small-in-population states joined forces to apply for a grant from NEA to fund an SLO training and implementation pilot project. The group was successful in securing funding for their three-year proposal, which includes both a national consortium of those states and individual state plans for bringing professional development to Association members. In 2014-15, WEA conducted a pilot program with a select group of education professionals from southeast Wyoming (Cohort 1). For seven months, these educators participated in professional development led by Dr. Jeri Thompson of the Center for Assessment headquartered in New Hampshire, and participants developed and implemented SLOs in their own classrooms. In June 2015, Cohort 1 teamed with the national trainer to begin a year-long training of a larger group of educators from throughout Wyoming (Cohort 2). That cohort started writing their SLOs this summer and has begun implementation in their classrooms this fall. The NEA grant calls for the two trained cohorts to roll out professional development for all interested districts and individuals beginning in summer 2016. So what are Student Learning Objectives? According to Dr. Thompson of the Center, "SLOs are content- and grade-specific learning goals describing what students should know and be able to do at the end of that course or grade. SLOs are ambitious and realistic learning goals established for individuals or groups of students. They can be measured to document student learning over a period of time," not a single moment in time, as a state assessment might do. SLOs have three components: 1) a high-quality learning goal, which requires identification of the "Big Idea" and of how the goal requires deep understanding, 2) assessments designed to support and measure the learning goal, and 3) targets: expected outcomes by the end of year or instructional period for the whole class as well as for different subgroups, as appropriate. According to Wyoming teachers who participated in the first year of training, SLOs encourage and support good teaching and student learning of content standards, but help us be more focused and authentic about our assessment. It is a different way of making us accountable in our own grade level and our own content area. It focuses us on how the data drives our instruction; SLOs give us a process to do that effectively. Regardless of whether SLOs become a means of formally evaluating teachers in Wyoming (that is still undecided), the belief is that this process can lead to improved teaching and practice and, in turn, improved student achievement. And isn't that really what we're all about in education?! MEET YOUR NEW WEA BOARD MEMBERS Liz Crislip Northeast Region President Lori Eggleston Southwest Region President Barb Gonzales Southeast Region Representative Lannette Lahey Central Region Representative Vicki Swenson WEA-Retired President Jon VanOverbeke Southeast Region Representative