Teacher leader: District collaboration more important than longer lesson plans

By Emily Richmond

Thursday, Dec. 10, 2009 | 4:54 p.m.

Teachers will be at the Clark County School Board meeting today to express concern over new – and more stringent – requirements for their written lesson plans.

Ruben Murillo, president of the Clark County Education Association, said in the past teachers would typically have a two to three page lesson plan for the week.

But teachers at a few district schools that have continually posted low test scores and been labeled in need of improvement are being required to submit more complex lesson plans that now run five to six pages, Murillo said.

Teachers aren’t opposed to doing more work, Murillo said. What concerns the union is that there was no discussion with teachers explaining the methodology behind the new requirement.

“Is this the most effective way to analyze a lesson?” Murillo asked. “If there’s a question about teachers meeting objectives, why not include teachers in the discussion of what the prescriptive measures should be?”

Earlier this week Murillo, along with Clark County Schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes, attended a summit in Washington, D.C. with U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Representatives from nine districts nationwide were invited to discuss ways union groups and district administration might work together to turn around failing schools.

"The key word that kept coming up was 'collaboration,'" Murillo said.

Bringing the teachers’ union into the discussion of the new lesson plan expectations would be a good start toward that goal, Murillo said.

At the summit, Duncan asked union leaders what it would take to get more top teachers into low-performing schools.

“In my mind the answer is `let me do my job, and let me part of the solution,’” Murillo said. “The answer might not be, `make me do a time-consuming lesson plan that someone on the outside has determined is the cause of students not achieving.’”

District officials today declined to comment on Murillo’s concerns in advance of tonight's meeting. However, one school administrator said the expanded lesson plans are intended to help teachers better track instruction and are a necessary part of the restructuring taking place at some of the district's lowest-performing schools.