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How a Learning Community Helped Me Relearn My Job

By Bill Ferriter

Maybe you’ll find this shocking, but here goes:

I openly admit that until I started to work with my professional learning team at Salem Middle School, I hadn't even really looked at the state standards for the subjects that I was teaching. Instead, I taught topics that other teachers in my subject area had been teaching or that were listed in my set of classroom textbooks. Over the course of 11 years, I'd developed a comfortable pattern of instruction based on a strong understanding of what I'd done in previous years and a remarkably weak understanding of the standards set by the state.

And I'm...