QTL News & Stories

DALEVILLE, VA - As Botetourt County Schools neared their goal of sending every teacher in their district through the Quality Teaching and Learning Program last semester, they began to ask the question, "What’s next?" 

The QTL™ program has been extremely successful over the past three years.  With student performance and teacher morale on the increase, and an evaluation that shows the system has already outpaced several surrounding Roanoke area districts, the question was easy to anticipate. QTL Instructor Tamara McCulloch was ready with a response. 

Botetourt County teachers are embarking on a new adventure with QTL and Whole Faculty Study Groups. Lord Botetourt High principal Alan Brenner says, "We have spent more time talking about instruction in February than we have in the last five years."

"We had been looking at Murphy's Whole Faculty Study Groups for the past 2 and a half years," she says. "The question was really WHEN we'd begin the process of integrating it into the QTL™ model."

The marriage of QTL™ with Whole Faculty Study Groups is really powerful match.  Teachers go through the first five days of the program to get to a strong instructional strategy level, and the model then allows their principal to take over the instructional leadership reins on those instructional strategies.

At Lord Botetourt High School, Principal Alan Brenner knew his teachers were presenting great collaborative projects aimed at specific student needs, but he wanted more.  He wanted to define his role as an instructional leader, and after hearing about Whole Faculty Study Groups (WFSG), he became more and more interested in starting the program right away. 

With the help of the QTL™ team, he scheduled a launch in his school in February, gathered and analyzed reams of student data, immediately identified 48 student needs, and assembled his entire faculty into 16 teams.  Each team took an identified need and began the process of addressing the need.

• One team looked at data collected on the number of F grades given in the school year.  The team decided to look at the characteristics of students who generally receive F’s and designed a project based on employability to address the student need.  The characteristics of employability match those of correcting most reasons a student receives an F.  First, is attendance.  You have to come to work.  Second, tardiness.  You have to understand the importance of being on time for work.  Then, they address what you wear to work, attitude, all designed to reduce the number of F’s given in the school year.
  
  
• Another team identified grammar that students just don’t remember.  They used data from the SOL’s to see what students commonly miss and what they commonly don’t learn. Teachers are pulling out those specific grammar terms and allowing students to teach those things to each other.  This group had tied its QTL Collaborative Project to this last year and are expanding that project for this Action Plan.

"Even if we raise the grades of just ONE child, we have been successful," Brenner says.  "It's the hard work we are doing, creating the Action Plans, addressing very specific student needs that will really make an impact on our kids."

"I have never felt as much like an instructional leader in the past than I do now that we've gotten into this Whole Faculty Study Group process.  It pulls in higher order thinking skills," Brenner adds.  "This process hurts your brain, but it's a good-feeling hurt."