Monday, June 21, 2010

Deliberate Excellence: Weast's Five Stages

Read all about it! Five stages to school system maturity.

Seven Keys to College Readiness.

The North Star (that would be North Star Number ONE, here, as opposed to the North Star project, what MCPS seems to be calling the Pearson deal).

Curricula with less choice about what is being taught.

Jerry Weast Explains It All To You in a current feature article in the June 2010 issue of The School Administrator, published by AASA,(No. 6, Vol 67) HERE: and sums up Montgomery County Public Schools by saying:

"A Stage 5 organization relies on its team to interpret these next steps. In Montgomery County, our professional learning communities have suggested some of the following solutions to common concerns:

• When there is too little time to teach all topics as discrete subject areas, we can create an integrated curriculum aligned with our goals but sensitive to our time.

• When students understand our high expectations but don’t value the work to get there, we can provide engagement strategies such as real-world applications or interest-based courses, programs and projects.

• When teachers need more content training but our face-to-face model is costly and time-consuming, we cannot only use technology, but implement job-embedded professional development.

• When staff is overwhelmed by too many monitoring tools, we can develop a gateway that integrates access to information through a single portal."


Read the whole article yourself HERE. And then ask yourself whether it reflects your child's experience.

1 comment:

  1. Don't miss the last line of the article. Superintendent Weast gives out his personal e-mail address to readers.


    Jerry Weast is superintendent of the Montgomery County Public Schools in Rockville, Md. E-mail: Jerry_Weast@mcpsmd.org

    No, parents don't get that e-mail address on the MCPS website, but other school system administrators get it from reading this article!

    ReplyDelete

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