Revolutionary new teaching tool goes live
By Doug Grindle Community Reporter

Marlborough - The first stage of a wide-ranging reform of the way the Marlborough School District teaches students is now up and running.

The district has created a new Web site that aims to standardize the curriculum, provide teachers with a generic set of teaching materials, and encourage the exchange of teaching ideas and lesson plans. The Web site began running in June, and the materials are being compiled this summer.

The goal is to more easily standardize what schools teach their students, and create a knowledge base that will provide a jumping-off point for teachers to begin teaching lessons as creatively as possible.

Previously, diff erent schools within the system taught different materials for the same grade.

"We were a system of programs, not a system of standards," Superintendent Barbara McGann said.

The curriculum is being standardized within grades, and the materials more closely coordinated between grades, so all students receive the same knowledge base in the same grade.

The new Web site is available to all teachers. It replaces reference books that previously held the curriculum but were little used, school officials said.

"They had notebooks on the shelves of the high school, but I don't know how often they were referenced," said Leisha Simon, the instructional technology director of the district and one of the architects of the Web site.

The Web site will provide a complete set of materials for every subject in every grade, including a subject outline, weekly lesson plans and quizzes, tests, essay questions and classroom slides to be used for individual lessons.

The content is being developed by "teacher-leaders" who are spending the summer creating the material in every subject for every grade.

The all-encompassing subject matter will allow teachers to exercise creativity. By using the online material, teachers will not have to spend as much time planning lessons, and can devote more time to figuring out how to make each lesson interesting.

"Teachers can be as creative as they want to be," McGann said.

New ideas will be easily and freely exchanged across the whole district. But McGann added that any new teaching ideas will be reviewed by peers.

"We are not going to allow a creative idea that does not reach the [academic] objective," McGann explained.

Four curriculum committees, led by school principals, assess new content for the curriculum and provide quality control.

The system is expected to be used by teachers at the beginning of the school year. Teachers will be taught how to use the new system this summer.

"Professional development is going to be needed to help it be adopted," Simon said.

Initially it will take extra work, but this will be off set by a sharp drop in the workload for teachers who do not have to plan every day's lesson at home, she added.

"It is a huge labor-saver," Mc- Gann added. "It's all there."

That labor savings will reduce any teacher resistance to the new technology, Simon said.

"I would hope it would be a natural embrace," she said.

This is the first stage in the plan. Next year, parents are expected to be able to access their children's grades and attendance records.

In stage two, the materials available to teachers will be expanded and a more interdisciplinary approach taken, allowing math concepts to be taught in art class, for instance. An initiative to ensure every teacher in whatever subject area teaches English will also come into force. And technology will begin to transform the way the teacher interacts with the students, both in front of the class and on a one-to-one basis. That will depend on the speed with which the district can aff ord to introduce new computers.

"It's a technology that really provides collaboration," Simon said.