From around Lane County this is what some of our teachers have to say:
The PLCs have made it easier to access and implement college level curricula with my diverse group of students. In PLCs, we engage in professional discourse which helps sharpen our practice and breathe new ideas into our approaches.
It’s wonderful to explore teaching techniques, feedback guidelines, and curriculum creation with colleagues from diverse teaching assignments and experience. Not only does it enrich what and how I teach, but it’s also opened up communication between the high school and college level. It’s invaluable for high school teachers to know what skill deficits the LCC instructors encounter in their freshmen so we may address those issues not only in our dual credit courses, but across our courses in general. Furthermore, the LCC instructors now have a better understanding of the framework within which secondary teachers work, namely the emphasis on and constraints of standardized testing.
I can’t express enough how essential the PLCs component of the Lane Regional Promise program has been to our burgeoning computer science program! The staffs and teachers at Lane ESD and Lane Community College–as well as colleagues at other districts in and around Lane County–have been crucial in my ability to teach high school students computer science courses in the classroom. They serve not only as a source and crutch for computer science content, but also a wealth of confidence for me in teaching strategies and approaches for this traditionally underserved content area.