TEACHERS SWAP KNOWLEDGE IN SEMO SUMMER ACADEMY

Teachers from school districts within the Mississippi River Delta are in the midst of a two-week interactive learning experience at Southeast Missouri State University.

The university is hosting two institutes for The National Faculty Delta Teachers' Academy from July 14-25. Math and language arts teaching teams from rural counties in Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana are attending the institutes, which emphasize providing teachers with new information and interactive ways of filtering it to their students.

Program directors Jane Haspel and Philip Andreini say the academy is very different from most professional development classes. They say the biggest difference is that other development opportunities are very short-term and provide "kits" that help teachers teach better. In contrast, they say, this academy has a long-term approach that provides teachers with new developments and trends in their discipline.

"We're working on the assumption that teachers are working on innovative ideas they get from our institutes," said Andreini, who heads the language arts institute. "We work on the simple premises that teachers teach best what they understand best and teachers are their own best resources."

Andreini said that the academy tries to stress the importance of long-term goals by requiring districts to be involved in the professional growth process. Districts are responsible for enrolling teaching teams into the academy, he said, and teams are required to make a three-year commitment to participate.

It takes three years to complete the academy, including at least four two-day sessions and one two-week summer institute each year, Andreini said. Teachers who complete the program become "fellows", and they may choose to continue participation on a more self-directed level.

"It's a very teacher-directed program," said Haspel, director of the math institute. "We find (university) scholars that the teachers can work with who are the best in each discipline. Everybody benefits, because the scholars learn from the teachers and the teachers learn from the scholars."

Both neophyte participants and fellows of the academy have nothing but praise for it. Alberta Watts, an academy fellow and junior high school reading specialist from Eudora, Ark., said her students definitely have benefited from the different teaching strategies she has gained from the academy.

"I definitely like the strategies coming from the different regions," she said. "I've taken it back and implemented it in the classroom activities, and the children have become excited because it's something new."

First-time attendee Judy Kellum, a Charleston, Miss., junior high math teacher, said the academy is helping her to teach better because she has a better idea of what students coming to her know and what teachers in higher grades are expecting them to know when they leave her class. "It builds a bridge from the younger grades to the older grades," she said. "It tells me what they're doing in grades before me and what I can expect my children to know."

Dr. Hariette Arrington, a professor of reading and language arts at the University of Kentucky, said the academy is one of the best staff development programs she has ever participated in. In fact, Arrington, who has been a scholar for two summer institutes, likes the program so well it's the only consulting group she works with.

"I think it's the only way to do staff development," she said. "If you're about the business of helping teachers be better learners, you can't do it with one-shot deals. There must be a commitment for the long-term."

Dr. Rudy Martin, a language arts professor from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., has served as an academy scholar since the 1970s. He said teachers benefit because they are exposed not only to new information in their discipline but also to new ways of teaching that have been successful in other regions of the country.

"Too often student teachers come out of college and go into the classrooms, and that's the end of the connection," Martin said. "This allows them to get back in touch with the mechanisms of teaching and also with their subjects.

"This is to help them advance their own education, not just to help them teach. By helping them be better educated, we're helping them help their students be better educated."