County teachers gather for training day at Colfax

Teachers from around the county attend training in Colfax.

Teachers became students for a day this week during a county-wide conference as part of a Professional Learning Communities program. The Monday session was at Colfax High School.

“I’m excited about some new strategies I learned for math interventions,” said Bobbi Mackleit, fourth-grade teacher at Oakesdale elementary.

Educators from the White River School District led many of the sessions. The Whitman County Principals Association came up with the idea for a training day in light of dwindling state dollars supporting teacher training.

In one session for elementary math teachers, Mari Holt of St. John talked about strategies for helping children catch up on math skills they may not have learned the first time the subject was taught. The technique is called “intervention.”

Holt later told the Gazette she practices interventions in her classroom every so often. Giving struggling students extra time to grasp a subject is key, she said.

“I’ve seen a really high increase in scores,” she said. Holt teaches fifth graders at St. John Elementary school.

Teachers in Holt’s session talked about strategies for interventions they picked up throughout the day.

One of the main goals of Professional Learning Communities is for teachers to swap tips with one another about the grades or subjects they are teaching.

Teachers at the session for elementary math teachers compared notes on ways to form an intervention.

One teacher said giving students a casual pre-test before the end of a unit was a good way to pick out what students may or may not have accurately learned.

Mackleit teaches math to fourth, fifth and sixth graders at Oakesdale Elementary. A problem she regularly faces is finding the time to help catch up the students in her math class who are not in her day-to-day class of fourth graders.

An idea she gleaned at the training day, she said, was designating time several times a week for an intervention.