Our building council investigated block scheduling and adopted that three years ago. Now, she says, they have time for grade-level teams and resource teachers to plan with classroom teachers. The resistance lessened when teachers could see the results with the children. They started with writing because the teachers were interested in it and it was a district goal to improve literacy. It was a natural and effective way of doing it.
Cash believes it is key to ask teachers what uses they see for a technology in their own classroom.
There had to be a connection between what they learned and what they were going to be doing. Once they saw something that worked, most people could see how they could incorporate it to make their jobs easier. In the beginning, Roster recalls, she felt she needed to show the teachers everything right away. Unfortunately, that didn't work. She began having more voluntary inservice meetings.