Standard 6 Focus Question 2
How does the school’s leadership foster a learning community?
- The leadership at Southeastern Louisiana University Laboratory School fosters a learning community in numerous ways. This is done by educating teachers, parents, students and community members in various ways. It is also accomplished by working as a team with a common goal.
- Teachers have the opportunity to work with colleagues, become stronger individual educators, and act as facilitators or sponsors of student activities. Staff development is offered after school, and each teacher may attend professional activities with support from the school administration. Teachers are also given a budget to help cover the costs incurred as a result of attending conferences. Our teachers are encouraged to assist each other in areas where one teacher may be an expert and another teacher may need assistance. Teachers are given opportunities to visit other schools with teachers who are strong in areas we hope to strengthen, and university methods students are integrated in our teaching, with dual purposes. One purpose is to model good teaching, but the other purpose is to learn up to date teaching methodologies.
- Students at our school have been quite fortunate lately because of a number of new programs and resources that are now available to them. We have created multi-grade level classes in order to individualize learning, and because of our partnership with Southeastern Louisiana University, we are able to offer free after school tutoring to any student who needs assistance or who simply wants to do daily homework. In this type of setting, students are also able to assist each other, and research states that students master content more effectively when they need to teach it to someone else.
- Parents play an integral role in the success of the children at our school. The PTO has enabled teachers to use many resources due to their financial generosity. We are able to fund Accelerated Reader, on-line subscriptions, athletics, author visits, Beta Club convention, and other educational manipulatives. We are also lucky to have a great number of parents with unique talents and interests who are willing to share with our students. For example, some parents play musical instruments or interesting careers, and teachers are able to invite them to become part of lessons, which makes education a great deal more authentic. Our librarian has regularly scheduled events to invite family and community members to school in order to participate in our school wide reading programs.
Artifacts