Entry #11: Teachers are like students.
They all learn in different ways.
Just a bit of snow in rural Kentucky usually closes school. We purposely
build our calendar around anticipating that we will miss some snow days
with actually very little snow accumulated on the ground. This Wednesday
was such a day. Everyone enjoyed the day off, and my in-box was close to
empty once again. However, the timing of the snow day wasn't very good,
because the U. S. Dept. of Education had contracted with a film crew to
be at BCMS on Thursday, the day after the snow day.
They were to be there ALL day, to capture innovative ideas for U.S. Secretary
of Education Richard Riley's Satellite Town Meeting on February 15. The
purpose of the show is to discuss high performing middle schools, and I
will be on the discussion panel with Secretary Riley.
Teachers had planned and sequenced their lessons so that the good video
footage would fall on Thursday, only to find that one of the sequencing
days was taken away. I realized that; I knew that we may not have every
classroom to tape, and I knew it would be okay. But our teachers went the
extra mile. Thursday morning, they were like little bees, trying to improvise
to create an appropriate lesson for the day. I could feel the tension mounting.
But the video crew was there, and we were "on with the show."
Interestingly, the first thing we did was interview a parent of one of our
seventh graders. When asked how BCMS had helped create a life-change for
his struggling student, he said, "All the teachers really care about
all the kids. They take the time to care about them, and they make learning
fun. My son has had a tremendous year." Chills ran up my arms. Even
though they are pressure-filled, these days help validate what we are trying
to do.
Along with that statement came other interviews with students and teachers,
and the chills kept coming because hearing the testimonials reinforced my
conviction that all the work was making a difference. The pinnacle of the
day, though, was a team's instructional planning session for February. Any
time that I am trying to create change in instruction and teacher growth,
I try to realize that teachers are like students. They all learn at different
rates, in different ways, and at different times. Trying to implement an
interdisciplinary, spiraling, arts-infused approach around a big focus through
the Different Ways of Knowing module is no different.
One of our teams had struggled with implementation last year. Each month
when we met with the Technical Assistance Coach from the Kentucky Collaborative
for Teaching and Learning, during team planning, I realized that they were
trying, and they were changing, but many of the things they were doing were
a bit contrived. This year, I began to notice things were different. HyperStudio,
PowerPoint, and the Internet infused their planning conversations, as well
as discussions around how to use art to increase learning. They have been
growing all year, and this Thursday, I participated in a discussion that
included a lot of talk about "culture" and "traditions"
and how they were weaving that throughout their teaching of "The Giver,"
ancient China, genetics, geometry, and transactive writing.
As the Technical Assistance Coach and I prepared to leave the room, she
said to the team, "You guys have got it! You see the big picture and
you have the spiraling approach occurring for kids."
The social studies teacher who has grown from "read the chapter and
do the questions" to asking the students to design mosaics to come
to know about Rome said, "And this is not fake. We really do plan like
this all the time!"
We all laughed and the chills came back again.
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