Rural Collaboratives

So what is an Eastern Oregon Rural Collaborative?

Important Upcoming Dates:

The Rural Collaborative was created by teachers tired of working in isolation and wanting a community of peers to help get things done. 

Our time is spent as a team focusing on these four questions:



As a team we work through the standards,  determine the essential skills, and build streamlined, quality assessments to measure student learning.  From there we help each other come up with the best ways to see more success for our students.  And all along the way we laugh, we cry, and we support each other as a group who knows what the daily teaching grind can be like.

We are not asking everyone to teach the same lessons the same way.  

Teachers have full autonomy and are encouraged to be creative and come up with innovative ways to introduce, teach, and review essential concepts.  We are asking everyone to use the same assessments (although everyone can also use their own).  The goal is to experiment and share with each other things that worked and things that did not work.

We meet with our team once a week on Zoom for 45 minutes and a few times each year in person. We do some hard work together, there’s no doubt about it, but in the end we have much more narrowed and precise learning objectives - and a way to measure the results.  Did students learn what we hoped they would learn, and to what degree?  We have found that with such a good plan in place, our overall prep time has decreased significantly.  We are LASER FOCUSED!

Achieving results together.

And finally, we don’t waste our time!  Teacher’s have precious little time to accomplish all of the planning and grading - especially when we have multiple preps.  We want all of our time spent together to translate into meaningful materials and techniques that we can use right away in our classrooms.

Results have been awesome. Teachers involved have seen improved student learning, which translates into better benchmark test scores. And there is so much more that could be said about the camaraderie and team spirit.  Many would say that their team feels like their “staff” and there’s ownership in each other’s students.

All are welcome and if the need or desire is there, we will keep creating new teams until all the isolated teachers out there have been found!

We currently have the following teams in place for 2023-2024:

Join one of our teams today!

If you are interested in joining one of our teams, or would like to learn more, please contact REN Coordinator, Jennifer Martin (Jennifer.Martin@malesd.org) or Rural Collaborative Lead, David Duncan (dduncan@wallowa.k12.or.us).