Enrichment program connects Catholic educators
Joe Kohn of The Michigan Catholic
Back to School, A Special Supplement Published August 24, 2007
DETROIT — The philanthropic Skillman Foundation, an organization concerned with children in the inner city, has extended its funding of a program to improve education in Detroit's Catholic schools — to the apparent delight of school administrators and teachers.
The initiative involves a team of veteran educators — called a city school resource team — visiting schools around the archdiocese. The team spends time in classrooms observing teachers, opening up dialogue between educators, and providing professional development.
"The Archdiocese of Detroit's city school resource team has made good progress in upgrading the quality of Catholic elementary education in the city," said Tonya Allen, the Skillman Foundation's vice president of programming, noting benchmarks made in several of Detroit's 10 Catholic grade schools.
The foundation funded and started the program last year for $182,000. This summer, the foundation reported it would grant the archdiocese $340,000 over the next two years to continue the program.
The team in the Archdiocese of Detroit is headed up by Mary Swinkey, Skillman program director for the archdiocese, and includes associate superintendents Sr. Joan Christie, OP, and Bernadette Sugrue of the archdiocesan Office for Catholic Schools.
The team coordinates in-house teams at each school. Each in-house team helps teachers communicate with each other within their own school, and also dialogue with other schools.
"We focus on best practices," says Swinkey, who personally visits each of the schools up to five time per year.
A best practice, she explains, is the most effective way to reach a child in the classroom. Through observing teachers in the classroom, the team often identifies best practices, and even writes them down on a card and shares them with the teacher on the spot.
From there, the school enrichment program encourages teachers to share such best practices with one another.
For example, Jan Machusak, a teacher at Holy Redeemer Elementary in southwest Detroit, learned a clever way to get students excited about a number. Through another teacher, she picked up the idea of celebrating Pi day — using a play on words to mix the mathematical formula of 3.14 with the dessert.
"On 3/14 (March 14), every student in my classroom got a three-by-five card with Pi on it," Machusak says. "We sang Pi carols. We did problems that had to calculate Pi. We read the story of Pi from the Internet. We brought in pie. We ate pie.
"It was something that was fun and that got the kids excited," she added. "It's kind of neat to see kids excited about math."
Likewise, Machusak was able to share one of her own "best practices" — teaching students about the solar system by using a creative travel brochure to take the students on a virtual planet-to-planet tour.
"Mary Swinkey was in my classroom as I was giving the presentation, and she started writing things down," says Machusak, who hadn't really thought of promoting the practice to teachers in other schools.
Sharing knowledge between educators, though, is a key to the Skillman-funded program, say principals of Detroit's Catholic schools.
Kathleen McBride, principal of Most Holy Trinity Elementary in Detroit's historic Corktown district, says that the days when teachers would close the door to their classroom and do their own thing are gone.
"That day is over, because that's not how kids learn," says McBride, noting that most students network with one another through cell phones, e-mails and electronic messaging. "We're not preparing them for the future if we're still doing that, and unless we provide them with those tools, we're really shortchanging them."
Indeed, professional development provided through the urban school enrichment program has taught teachers how to connect technologically through Web sites, blogging and even through an interactive online encyclopedia.
Holy Redeemer principal Sr. Elizabeth Fleckenstein, IHM, says the training has enabled her staff to learn more advanced ways of reaching their students.
"Our teachers have really begun experiencing and thinking outside the box, and their own comfort zones, because of the professional development they've received," Sr. Fleckenstein says.
And that, she adds, is vital to the situation most inner-city students find themselves in.
"Our kids come from socioeconomic backgrounds that are poverty level or below," she says. "We're trying to allow them to compete and take their place in the world with everybody else."
Aside from opening the doors of communication between teachers and schools, administrators have found value in the affirmation they receive from the city school enrichment program.
At St. Mary of Redford school on Detroit's west side, principal Sr. Loretta Schroeder, IHM, says the teachers have benefited from a better dialogue with each other.
"They have really found that enjoyable," Sr. Schroeder says. "It's been a really positive type of thing for us … and the encouragement from (the city school resource team) has been very helpful.
"Their focus, at least in the first year, was 'These are the positive things that we're seeing,'" she adds.
Like other principals, Sr. Schroeder is hopeful that the next two year's worth of the program will be as valuable as the first. No doubt, the first year received high marks.
"So far," she says, "people have seen it as of value."
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