The Learning Partnerships Specialist: Building the New and Needed Web of Learning Support

Technos: Quarterly for Education and Technology, Spring, 2000 by Dorothy Rich

For each school, we can think of having at least one LPS who can be trained and designated for this role. For high schools with large enrollments, we have to think of having at least two people.

Often the first question in education tends to be, how can we cut costs? It's almost as if anything new by definition costs too much. In view of what's happening today and the enormous need for melding academics and character, what we need to ask instead is, how can we not afford it?

LEGISLATIVE PROPOSAL

The training of Learning Partnerships Specialists is being introduced as a legislative proposal, and there is strong interest in supporting this legislation.

Legislators represent growing constituencies of young families today. The family's educational role is in the spotlight, and there is increasing realization that schools do not now have the personnel to tackle partnership issues.

Legislators realize that families, balancing the demands of work and home, want to do right by their children. They are seeking good schools, and they know the importance of excellent education for their children. And, they know they need help to pull it together.

The goal of this legislation is to train a corps of Learning Partnerships Specialists whose primary role is to increase children's capacities for learning and achievement by and through greater family and community involvement in education.

These specialists will work on site at schools to help teachers and families make the connections that are needed for optimal learning today at both the elementary and secondary levels. The goal is to train as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Most of the participants will be drawn from the ranks of already employed school personnel. Plus, there's a training-of-trainers component.

Essentially, this is how the plan works:

* Accelerated Training Institutes for groups of educators and parents who will be trained for leadership roles in the how-to's of creating and maintaining learning partnerships. This includes workshops and materials for families and collaborations with businesses and community organizations (see "LPS Training Proposal" section).

* Service Programs within the next school semesters. This is the next step in which participants from original institutes deliver programs that they were trained to provide in their communities. Through their performance, they are identified to become trainers of future LPSs.

* Trainer of Trainers Institutes. This next level of training is provided to the "stars" of the service programs. These are the people who build the internal capacity of local school systems to continue and expand the work of LPSs at their own sites.

LSP TRAINING PROPOSAL

In the early 1970s, long before I devised the MegaSkills[R] Program, I developed a master's degree in School and Family Community Involvement. It was well before its time then, and it is both encouraging and discouraging nearly 30 years later to see that tragic events inside and outside of the school at the turn of the century tell us that the time for this training is now. The LPS builds on what we know and what we must do.