Once a month for the next year and a half two representatives from the Lead to Learn program, Mrs. Toni Hollingsworth and Mrs. Lisa Piazzola, will be observing classrooms and improving instructional skills implemented by the teachers within the district.
“Lead to Learn is an organization that the school district has partnered with to provide professional development for our teachers,” Superintendent Jeffrey Fuller said. “They are going to be coming in and working with all of the teachers in the district…to help develop instruction skills.”
The decision to bring this program to Freedom was not due to poor instructional skills, but rather to move forward as a district.
“We already have…phenomenal teachers doing great things instructionally in the classrooms…but you can always get better,” Fuller said. “This program is really a coaching model. [Lead to Learn] is taking the already strong instructional skills of our teachers and making them better.”
Hollingsworth and Piazzola want to ensure that students are learning to the best of their ability. They typically spend between 10 and 30 minutes observing each classroom, then debrief the teacher on what they’re doing well and what can be improved for better learning.
“You know, everybody can benefit from having a coach,” Hollingsworth said. “The students benefit because [they] are going to be able to understand things more, to retain information longer because [they] will have a deeper understanding of it.”
“You don’t learn because a teacher stands in front of you and tells you information. You learn when you are forced to interact with the information,” Fuller said.
This program was brought to Freedom as a solution for improvement by Fuller, who was familiar with this program. Fuller, former Assistant Superintendent for Seneca Valley’s elementary schools, was there when this program was implemented at Seneca Valley five years ago.
Lead to Learn, along with several other changes at Seneca Valley, allowed for their movement from 74 to 12 according to Western Pennsylvania’s Business Times.
The total cost of this program was $336,000.