By Ben Schorzman/The Daily Astorian
Published July 30, 2010
Professional development for teachers often gets overlooked in the grand scheme of district budgets, said Astoria School District Superintendent Craig Hoppes. The Oregon Community Foundation was able to help with that this summer, after a grant it provided the North Coast Leadership Council helped pay for teachers to attend summer workshops. "The only training we can pay for is through grants," Hoppes said. "As bad as the economy is, the OCF came at the right time."
The OCF provided $1 million to each of the regions it manages in Oregon, and after it was all said and done $500,000 ended up in the hands of the North Coast Leadership Council. From there, the council decided to invest more than $230,000 on training teachers from Tillamook, Clatsop and Columbia counties in Project Guided Language Acquisition Design.
Named GLAD for short, the program has been around for 20 years, but it continues to prove to teachers and administrators around the state its effectiveness - it just costs a lot to implement.
Hoppes said that 85 to 90 percent of the teachers in the district are trained in GLAD, and this year six more from John Jacob Astor Elementary School took part in the workshops. In all, 44 teachers from the North Coast participated in the seven-day session in Seaside, where they first learned from, then observed a GLAD instructor teaching a group of kids.
"I was completely sold on it," said first-grade teacher Theresa Varner. "There are great teaching strategies. "
The program was originally developed in California two decades ago to help districts with large Spanish-speaking populations teach English. It has since moved throughout Oregon and Washington, and has been used to success in Forest Grove and Hillsboro, where there are big Hispanic populations. Using visual clues, teamwork, chants and songs as some of the methods,GLAD creates what instructor Lara Smith calls "sheltered instruction." Kids sit in groups of four instead of in rows and use each other to reinforce what's being taught.
"We try and create a sense of team/' Smith said. "We can produce and accomplish much more as a team."
She adds one of the first things people notice when walking into a GLAD classroom are the walls. Teachers and students create visuals that are later used as reminders for learning key subject matter.
"The walls are dripping with literacy," Smith said. "The kids look to the walls for help."
"It's kind of like a laboratory," said Melissa Durham, the OCF Regional Action Initiative Coordinator (RAI). "The goal is to get them to have fun and learn at the same time."
Hoppes said this was the third group of teachers from the Astoria School District who have gone to the workshops. He said that even though the program has been around for a while the money has always limited the number they could send.
But once they go, they come back with even more ideas.
"It changed the way I look at teaching," Varner said.
She plans on using GLAD not only for teaching English, but also for every part of her curriculum. She sees it as an effective strategy no matter the subject.
"It's great for all learners," Varner said.
Durham gets excited when she hears teachers like Varner talk about ways the RAI and OCF have helped. Whether it's funding teacher training or providing scholarships, the OCF has been a major source of philanthropy in Oregon since 1973. The foundation has an almost $1 billion endowment, and by being a resource for communities to pool donations, each region can decide what needs to be financed.
"We want to empower councils to improve lives in their community," Durham said.