A Portrait of Two ARSI Regional Teacher Partners in Lincoln County, Kentucky

INTRODUCTION: The following report is one of three that depict what ARSI work looked like “on the ground,” that is, in actual small rural school districts scattered across Appalachia. It is a portrait of how the design, values and intent of ARSI played out in practice, in a specific place and time. We at Inverness Research Associates have deliberately used the term portrait as the title of these three individual reports, because they are very much about real people and how in their own hands they brought the ideas and goals of ARSI to the K-12 students in their local regions. To read an overview of the different roles ARSI educators filled and played within the project, please see the report titled “An Overview of ARSI: The Genesis, The Contextual Landscape, and the Model that Evolved.”

Inverness Research´s second portrait is about a dynamic team of two ARSI Regional Teacher Partners, Ann Booth and Gloria Davis. Both women shared a strong commitment to standards-based instruction, to the improvement of student learning, and to helping teachers learn to use student assessment data for improving their instruction. Ms. Booth´s work was mostly at the middle and high school level, while Ms. Davis worked primarily at the elementary level. Theirs is a story of partnership in action. It exemplifies how ARSI teacher leaders typically drew on one another for support, using whatever resources or influence they had at hand, seizing opportunistically at circumstances as they occurred, and rarely flagged in their energy for and commitment to making their schools better.

A PORTRAIT OF TWO ARSI REGIONAL TEACHER PARTNERS IN LINCOLN COUNTY, KENTUCKY

By Jenifer Helms

The title “Teacher Partner” was no accident. It emerged after long discussions about the appropriate title for the teacher leader positions during the proposal writing phase of ARSI. The Teacher Partners (TPs) had to be optimally positioned to be accepted by the classroom teachers they were intended to help. That meant they had to be seen as colleagues. The extra training and support they would receive from ARSI would equip them with new knowledge and expertise, but Teacher Partners should, at the end of the day, be equals and peers to those they served.

In Kentucky, one of the six participating ARSI states, the Teacher Partner concept soon gave rise to the Regional Teacher Partners (RTPs). This complementary project, known as the “Master Teacher Project,” was designed after the Teacher Partner model but with one key difference. Rather than supporting their home district exclusively, the five designated Kentucky Regional Teacher Partners and one Tennessee Regional Teacher Partner focused on providing support to individual schools across a region of the state, often encompassing more than one district.

Ann Booth, one of the two RTPs profiled in this portrait, recalled one of the first meetings of the Regional Teacher Partners:

At the first meeting we said, ‘We can’t call ourselves master teachers. We can’t go out and say—here I come!’ That is not going to work. We spent a good part of that very first meeting deciding what we were going to call ourselves, and it wasn’t going to be master teacher. That just doesn’t cut it. I really feel that I am learning as much as anybody in the building. Besides, nobody ever gets to be a master teacher.

Although the “master teacher” moniker stayed as the official title of the program, Ann’s reaction to the discussion reflected important underlying aspects of the ARSI culture which permeated the efforts of its teacher leaders. First, it exemplified the strong egalitarian norm that infused the ARSI project throughout its many expressions in Appalachia, including the creation of Teacher Partners and components of the Regional Teacher Partner program. Second, it highlighted the belief that teacher leaders would be best utilized as facilitators, not as authorities, as colleagues bringing resources to inform and assist fellow teachers, not as experts to ‘show and tell’. Third, Ann’s words showed her desire to continue to learn. She, like the great majority of ARSI teacher leaders, considered herself a participant with much to learn in an ongoing effort to improve student learning. Finally, Ann’s reactions highlighted the notion that it takes more than a single person to bring about significant change, that two heads are much better than one.

The portrait that follows describes the experiences and impact of two Regional Teacher Partners in Lincoln County, Kentucky. Ann Booth and Gloria Davis served as ARSI RTPs, Ann from Fall of 2001 to Spring of 2005, and Gloria from Summer of 2002 to Summer of 2005, providing support to teachers beyond their home county to surrounding school districts. Both women shared a strong commitment to standards-based instruction, to the improvement of student learning, and to helping other teachers in any way that they could. They were also both very committed not only to the theory, but also to the practice of collaborative work in the service of mathematics and science education improvement. While each had her own style and way of working with teachers, they relied on one another for knowledge, motivation, and strategy, as well as reassurance that they were on the right path.

Theirs is a story of partnership-in-action. We have chosen to tell their story because it exemplifies how ARSI teacher leaders went about the work of improving mathematics and science education in their local regions—drawing on each other for support, using whatever resources or influence they had at hand, seizing opportunities as they appeared, and rarely flagging in their energy for and commitment to making the schools they served better. Ann Booth and Gloria Davis used ARSI principles and values to guide and strengthen their work, and one another.

Lincoln County: The County and the School District Context

Lincoln County, Kentucky sits in the south central region of the state, an area that straddles both the Bluegrass region in the north and the area known as the Southern Knobs in the south. The mountainous Knobs form part of a circle of ridges that enclosed this part of Kentucky.

The county seat is Stanford, a town of roughly 3500. According to the most recent census data (2000), there are 23,361 people living in Lincoln County overall, roughly 70 people per square mile. Not unlike the surrounding counties, the unemployment rate is high, and of those who do work, many tend to hold part-time, minimum-wage, or low-wage jobs. Of the 9,210 households that reported income in 1999, the median income was $26,542. Of the 1,107 families living in poverty in the county, 22% include children under 18, while 29% include children under 5.

If you wish to continue reading this report, please download the full report (PDF)

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