Education Reforms Test Teachers Big Districts Generally Moving Faster On Learning Requirements

In four years, Washington’s new learning requirements will become mandatory in the state’s public schools.

For now, teachers, schools and districts are doing the learning, finding out just what kind of changes lie ahead. The state has allocated $5.7 million in 1995-96 for training programs related to the shift.

There’s some resistance among veteran educators, who have watched education fads come and go.

“We’re pretty set in our ways. It’s hard for us to do an about-face,” said Lynden math teacher Shirley Arneson, who took a wait-and-see attitude when the Legislature passed the education reform bill in 1993.

Arneson was among 132 teachers at a recent workshop organized by the University of Washington. The session started with a questionnaire asking participants for their views on the overhaul.

The comments ran the gamut from wild enthusiasm - “I don’t know how I’ve lived without this until now!” - to apprehension - “This is just one more thing that teachers are being asked to do and I don’t like it!”

The response among the state’s 296 public school districts has been about the same.

About 180 of the districts - mostly small and rural ones - have not applied for state grants to plan and carry out the learning requirements. Many larger districts - Edmonds, Northshore, Everett, Shoreline and Seattle - are aggressively pursuing the reforms.

But the wariness is wearing off as educators recognize that lawmakers are not moving to undercut the reform bill, said Dennis Ray, director of Washington State University’s Center for Education Partnership in Spokane.

Some smaller districts don’t have a curriculum staff or personnel to write grant proposals, and prefer to stay with the “tried and true” while larger districts try new methods.

Those coordinating the training programs aren’t worried.

The “essential learning” requirements were adopted last year by the state Commission on Student Learning in reading, writing, communication and mathematics, and just last month in science, social studies, art and fitness-health.

“I think we’ll see a huge swing in the learning curve” of educators, said Jane Gutting, who directs a teacher-training consortium involving 25 Yakima and Kittitas county districts, plus Central Washington University and Heritage College.

The 1993 law calls for a “performance-based” education system.

Students will no longer be able earn credits simply by doing D-level work. Instead, they’ll have to demonstrate that they have mastered specific, higher-level learning requirements.

For that to happen, tachers will have to “understand the standards and to truly know and be able to use a whole variety of instructional strategies,” said Jill Matthies, who directs a training consortium whose members include the Bellevue, Federal Way, Issaquah and Tahoma school districts, Seattle Pacific University and UW.

Research shows students learn in a variety of ways, and teachers must be “better prepared to match the learners with the (desired learning) outcomes,” Matthies said.

The recent two-day UW workshop in Shoreline offered new ways to assess student learning. In one exercise, small groups of teachers came up with options such as book reports, essays, role-playing, videotaped presentations, journals, debates and drawings.

“The sky’s the limit,” one group wrote.

Judee Axelsen, director of education professional development at Seattle Pacific, believes the reform movement is at a crossroads with educators.

“I think some feel that they’ve been there, done that, and hope it will go away,” she said. “Hopefully, those people are in the minority.”