Excerpt from an interview with Marilyn Myers, recipient of the 2009 RAPSA Administrator of the Year Award

I believe that effective learning communities are built on a solid foundation of relationships, especially in a virtual world.

These relationships are based on effective respectful communication, a sense of transparency, and a culture of trust. The lack of daily, physical face to face contact is often cited as a potential weakness in our environment. However, high quality interactions between and among stakeholders ensures an effective learning community. Respect is the key to these interactions. For enduring success, learning communities must also be based on the ability to build a sense of transparency and trust that always remains. Effective leaders must show everyone they work with respect, consideration, and courtesy because these things can be the dividing line between victory and defeat in the battle for students’ hearts and minds. These factors are the heartbeat of a successful learning community.

Excerpt from an interview with David Ballard, recipient of the 2009 RAPSA Best Practices Teaching Award

The most important thing that you can do to teach mathematics is to provide ample opportunity for perfect practice. Students must practice Algebra, and they must practice it perfectly. To see that perfect practice is available to my students, I wrote and recorded an Algebra I and Geometry text. I have recorded the Algebra I and Mrs. Folse, our Geometry teacher, is recording the Geometry. These videos are available to our students via take home hard drives, take home DVD sets, in school networking, and now available via the internet to the whole world for free at  http://math.prairiland.net. I have been working hard to see that these videos become available and am presently converting them to MPEG-4 files to create faster downloads and to make them ready to dump into I-Pods, I-Phones, etc.  I am portable. The students can take me with them everywhere they go. All of the Algebra I and Geometry material on this sight is free for download and may be used by anyone. It is not for sale and is not to be sold. My number sense material will be for sale.

We mandate success. I call it mandatory opportunity. You can see my grade recovery policy on my teacher web-page.  www.prairiland.net/fm/dballard/files/2008-2009pare.doc.  We place our bottom 30% in an academic lab class as an Algebra I study hall. They do not stay the bottom 30% for very long. They use all 45 minutes positively. We require attendance to tutorials and detentions for academic shortfalls. Time on task is the answer.

Erin Gruwell, an inner-city school teacher whose story inspired the film “Freedom Writers,” spoke to a rapt audience of educators at the 4th Annual Reaching At-Promise Students National Conference on February 22, 2009.  Using her experience as a backdrop, Gruwell discussed how teachers and administrators could become catalysts for change at their school sites.

“I believe in teaching to a student,” Gruwell noted.  “It doesn’t matter where they came from; it matters where they’re headed.”  She implored her audience to “teach to a kid to help him find the potential” and reflected that “every single one of [her] students has some kind of journey, some kind of odyssey.”

Gruwell’s keynote was on the final day of a three-day conference for elementary and secondary educators working with at-risk students.  This event brought an international contingent of educators together to learn relevant and practical instructional strategies and leadership methods. 

Co-sponsored by the School for Integrated Academics and Technologies (SIATech) and the Reaching At-Promise Students Association (RAPSA), this comprehensive professional development event included presentations by premier educators Dr. Ruby Payne and Dr. Lorraine Monroe.