May 2008 — News

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Pearson 'Academies' Bring Online Professional Development to Smaller Districts

by Dave Nagel

Pearson this week launched a new online teacher professional development service. Dubbed Pearson Professional Growth Academies, the service is designed to bring instructional content from accredited universities to smaller districts by providing courses that don't require minimum enrollment.

Professional Development
PPGA comprises individual Academies spotlighting topics that that Pearson cited as being critical to smaller districts. These include:

  • Teacher Induction Academy, which is aimed at first-year teachers, covering classroom management, parent and student communication, organization, and assessment strategies;
  • Elementary Reading Academy, which focuses on research-based instructional strategies for assessment and building student literacy skills;
  • Middle-Level Reading Academy, which focuses on building literacy skills across the curriculum; and
  • ELL Instruction Academy, which focuses on building achievement for ELL students.

Each Academy includes 21 weeks of graduate-level instructional content and facilitation through accredited universities; an Action Research Project, which is designed to address needs of the specific district; and eight weeks of support following the completion of each academy.

Pearson said cohorts for summer 2008 and the 2008-2009 school year are forming now. Further information can be found at the Academies site here.

Learning Tools
In other fairly recent Pearson news, the company announced that 17 new districts have signed on for their education technology products. In Minnesota, Dunwoody Academy High School and Robbinsdale Cooper High School have deployed WriteToLearn, a Web-based writing and reading comprehension tool. It's being used to help improve achievement on the new Minnesota writing assessment.

Over in Illinois, 15 districts have signed on to use enVisionMATH, a math curriculum targeted specifically toward elementary students that debuted back in January of this year.

According to Pearson, enVisionMATH is aimed at students who "are growing up in a digital world of iPods, the Internet, instant messaging, and computer games, but, until now,... have all been 'powering down' when they enter the classroom." Authored by Randy Charles, former vice president of the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics, the program provides personalized instruction using graphics, animations, and interactive learning tools to provide math education for a wide range of students, including special needs and ELL students.

Illinois' Decatur Public Schools #61 piloted enVisionMATH with more than more than 6,000 elementary students.