Week 8 Step 6 Bridget Costello

Review the required reading documents - the Funding, and Management resources; then provide the input for your institution as the following required topic.

1. Develop strategies for funding.

1.      One of the strategies that has been used in our district and I plan to use in my plan is offering jeans passes. It is something that all teachers enjoy and allows for a slightly more relaxed environment on a stressful day (Lowery, 2012). They do not cost the district anything but are great motivation for teachers. All the district needs to do is provide the paper for which they can be printed on. Teachers can choose any day they would like to wear them unless otherwise stated that a certain day is not acceptable for jeans.

2.      TEA’s site is also has a great section that allows teachers to see what grants are available for which purposes. Another strategy that I would include in my plan is to have a staff development meeting in which the staff would be walked through how to use this resource. It would give them the opportunity to see how it can help them and how to actually use it. Some teachers are reluctant to use new resources when they do not know how to use them. The site has many drop-down menus and much information that is needed in order to complete the form (Texas Education Agency, 2007-2010). Going through the site in a staff development will make the teachers feel better about using it themselves and feel confident enough to complete it.

3.      Another strategy I am going to implement is offering simple incentives for teachers who write grants in order to receive funding for their instruction. These grants will come from the Huntsville Education Foundation (HEF) (Williams, 2012). They award a certain amount of grants in order to get teachers to do more hands on teaching and bring more innovative ideas in the classroom. The grants are due around the first week in April to the principal in order for them to be reviewed and edited if need be. This is a very valuable resource for teachers and the grants are awarded to only Huntsville teachers and make it more real to the teachers that they might receive a grant. The incentives I would plan to offer would be leave early passes or come late passes. This would allow teachers to leave at 3:30 if they would like to get a jump on travel, or running errands after school. The come in late pass allows teachers to come in at 8:00 instead of 7:30. This again is not something that would cost the district anything. The come in late pass would only require someone to cover the teacher’s classroom for the first 30 minutes of the day. The leave early pass is something that would require nothing from the district. By 3:30, teacher’s duties are over and the students are gone. I also would throw jean passes into this strategy. I believe that all of these options are not an expense and yet would be great motivation to teachers.

2.       Develop strategies for management plans.

1. 101 best web sites for teacher tools and professional development (2006) is one of the tools that I will be using for my plan for objective #2. New teachers need to the tools in order to bring the best technologies for their students. This is a tool that will be implemented during new teacher training. The technology facilitator who will be showing this document will need to go through the sites before hand and pick some of the best ones for new teachers in order to show some of them quickly. It would be impossible to have enough time to go through all 101 sites in a training session. However, if the facilitator will pick out the best ones, then the new teachers can use their own down time to look at the rest of the sites. Then, the new teachers will be able to choose which ones will be the most beneficial to them. I plan to pass this document to my technology department to see if they would like to use it in their technology trainings to spread the word about any of these sites that they believe will be beneficial to the staff.

2. Another management strategy that I will be using is really utilizing Google Docs. They have the ability to make surveys and give access to many different people. This is how I will be creating the survey that will be used to find out what type of training new teachers want to do and how effective current teachers feel trainings are. This will allow me to collect all the data in one place and also make it easy on teachers to fill out. They do not need to email back the form, or keep track of it. All they do is fill it out and it is sent back to the creator. The online survey, I feel, will get more results than one that is either emailed or handed out by paper and pencil. It will be less to keep track of and also it makes bringing the results together easy for the creator.

3.       Describe the required procedures for the proposed strategies.

1. In order to implement the strategy of offering incentives to have teachers participate in trainings and conferences, the jeans passes and leave/come early passes need to be verified by the administration office. It does not take any funding to create these, but administration needs to accept the idea in order to begin implementation of it. Once this has been achieved, the technology department needs to plan out their trainings for the year. They need to decide at which of these trainings incentives will be offered. The ones that incentives will be offered at should be important and beneficial to teachers. Once these trainings have been decided and finalized, flyers need to be made and put up in teachers lounges around the district so that teachers are aware. They also need to send out an email ahead of time so that teachers have the opportunity to plan to be there. A description of the training needs to be included on the flyers and emails so that teachers can know what it is about and decide if it is a training they feel will be beneficial for their teaching style. The training needs to be fun and engaging for teachers so that they will want to participate again in these types of trainings. Jeans passes and leave/come early passes will not be enough if the training is boring or not what they expected it to be. When teachers are leaving the training, they will be given one pass of their choice. As soon as the training is over, feedback needs to be sent to the participants so that the presenters will know if it was a good presentation and if not, what can be improved. Once the participant has sent back this feedback, their 2nd pass will be sent over. With holding the 2^nd pass until this time will encourage teachers to fill out the feedback. The results from the survey and the amount of people who signed up and the people who actually came will show the presenters how well this incentive works. They will need to re-evaluate this method after each of the incentive trainings. This way they will be constantly checking to see if offering these incentives makes a difference or not.

2. In order to implement the survey for what trainings teachers would like to have or which ones they thought would be beneficial, google accounts will need to be created for the members of the district. It would be much easier if the teachers school emails would be able to be used so that is another step that needs to be looked into. Once the method for the Google Docs account has been decided, teachers need to be made aware of their user name and create a password. Once this has been done, the survey about what type of trainings they want to have needs to be made available. This survey will be given at the beginning of the year and will help technology decide what trainings to do for the upcoming year. I feel that an incentive to fill it out would be great for this too. Passes will again be my incentive to be used. Once teachers fill out this beginning of the year survey, their passes will be sent to them. The last question on the survey will be what type of pass they would like. This is how they will get the pass they want. Later on in the year, another survey will be created and sent out to the users. This survey will ask questions about the trainings that were put on throughout the year. It will allow technology to see what type of trainings were found to be beneficial to teachers, and which seemed more like a waste of time. This information will help to guide the trainings that will be planned for the following year.

3. When it comes to grant writing, Huntsville, already does a great job of showing teachers how simple it is. The representative from HEF on each campus will pass out the information and walk teachers through writing a grant. They give a brief overview but anyone who is interested will be able to have enough information to try it on their own. I would like to take it a step farther and offer and after school Question and Answer session for those who are truly interested in writing a grant. In this session, the HEF representative and anyone who has had experience writing grants can come and answer questions or even help with the writing of grants. I know for me, it is hard to find time to work on something extra unless there was a specific time for me to work on it. I think that with this question and answer session more grants will be written. I think it would also have more competition for the grants, but with more grants being written, they might think about extending the amount they give out and allow for more innovative ideas in the classroom to be put into play. I think that sometimes it is just sitting down and getting it done that holds teachers back from writing grants to get these tools to use in the classroom. I hope that my idea to give them a time to do it, will encourage teachers to write more grants!

Bibliography

101 Best Web Sites for Teacher Tools and Professional Development. (2006). Retrieved March 16, 2012, from International Society for Technology in Education: http://shsu.ecollege.com/re/DotNextLaunch.asp?courseid=5981781&userid=10141995&sessionid=d827127b11&tabid=2+y89IIfDXTgcGTHu9pOJE34gq9k7q4ZJIfj98yGBV5xkb/5ktj1d/aSiVqO5qehcytSoVe54nQ1G4JrY0phPq8nQrSsp7VZ4DzVCpc6TLY=&sessionFirstAuthStore=true&macid=0dyQSRr

Lowery, B. (2012, March 9). 3rd Grade Teacher. (B. Costello, Interviewer)

Texas Education Agency. (2007-2010). Retrieved March 17, 2012, from TEA Grant Opportunities: http://shsu.ecollege.com/re/DotNextLaunch.asp?courseid=5981781&userid=10141995&sessionid=2148cf8663&tabid=Lch9ErpbnW/EbLX+MP3iGghUq5JJ6bmTHLsSINBwEKMEIL5VorLD4rl5vRE9oTsdD07QkNnFt6U2boOrtK2POPVH+A3JmD2eLZvNK7CAl2c=&sessionFirstAuthStore=true&macid=ruN6NlI

Williams, S. (2012, March 12). HEF Representative from Stewart Elementary. (B. Costello, Interviewer)