Partners at Lake Washington - PALS, or Partners at Lake Washington Schools program that involves corporate employees in public school curricula

Business Horizons, Sept-Oct, 1993 by Ron Barnes, Karen Bates

The PALS program also affects teachers. To provide all students with the increasingly complex knowledge and skills they need, the role of the teacher must change. All classrooms need integrated instruction, multi-age instructional groupings, active learning, and individualized instruction. Teachers' roles are changing from being the learning authority and dispenser of information to one of team manager and CEO of the classroom. Having partners from industry working together with teachers assists them in understanding the need for this new management model. To further this effort, several teachers who have successfully hosted business partners in their classroom recently developed a training course for district teachers on how to integrate other adults into the class effectively in order to achieve classroom goals and student learning outcomes.

Besides the PALS program, Lake Washington is pursuing other partnerships that support its restructuring efforts. The Quality Institute offered by Boeing Computer Services during the summer of 1992 provides a good example of this. Twenty staff members from across the district attended a two-week intensive training session conducted by Boeing on quality improvement and team building. Several members of the Boeing training staff, led by the manager of organizational development - herself a former teacher - took formal concepts in the domain of private industry and made them relevant and understandable to educators.

In follow-up sessions throughout the year, Boeing and the district have been monitoring the progress of participants in applying these concepts to their classrooms and schools. On the basis of this initial success, Lake Washington received a Boeing grant for 36 staff members from six district schools to attend similar training that began in May and will continue for an entire year. Participating chools were selected based on their understanding of how they could restructure their education system.

Partnerships - with parents, businesses, and the community - are one of the three building blocks of Lake Washington's restructuring effort. We believe that to improve educational outcomes for all students dramatically, we must change our entire system of schooling. Partnerships, together with the use of time and staff, are the systemic variables that must be changed. Historically we have allowed student achievement to vary, treating everything else related to schooling as fixed. This is not an acceptable operating system. To change, however, requires participation from our business community to help effect the transformation and to lend credibility to our efforts.

Just as partnerships among corporations are increasingly common and even necessary for survival in private industry, partnerships are critical to the success of public education. The PALS program is the first step in building a network of business-school partnerships that will lead to meaningful systemic change and a more relevant and challenging education for all students.