Part 2, Assignment 2

My school prides itself on being an Academically Recognized school, starting new programs, and having several advanced ratings on the STaR chart. With that said, I believe it is very difficult to maintain such a high level of achievement while continuing to do what we have always done in the past. The learning and teaching is changing everyday so we need teachers that are changing with those trends. The area of the STaR chart that I am going to focus on is the Educator Preparations and Development. This area includes improving the skills of students currently in the education programs at universities as well as providing professional development for current teachers.

Currently progress with most districts is at the developing stage in this area and the progress from year to year has not been raised at a significant rate (<1%). The number of districts at the early stage has continued to decrease each year but the number of districts at the target area has dropped and only includes about .7% of all schools. About 24% of the budget of a district is used in this area. Although that is a great deal of the budget, it appears that the amount of money spent has not helped to raise the use of technology in the classroom. My district has continued to make progress in this area each year but needs to continue to focus on this area in order to reach the Target area.

Part of why we have continued to improve is because of the new technology that has been installed at our school and the training that has been provided. I believe this is directly related to the type of professional development that is being offered at a school and at the district level. We must get away from professional developments that are product based and begin having professional developments that are student based. In addition, these professional developments need to be hands on and focused on how we can use the product in the classroom. Having the technology at our school is great but many of the products were introduced to us at the beginning of the year and we were simply taught how to use them. Ideally, we need a day to "play" with the equipment so that we are even aware of the capabilites of the products and how we can apply that to our classroom. At some point the number of products we buy needs to slow down and we need to utilize what we have to continue challenging students and seeing technology as an instrument to help us teach, not as another class to teach.

In order to get to that Target area we need to align the TEKS with the technology and continue to write curriculum that has regular technology-supported learner-centered projects. The amount of money used for professional development also needs to increase to 30% of the budget.