Throughout my year, I have made a commitment to spend an hour a day for a week with individual teachers collaborating, reflecting, and team teaching with them. My intention was to build relationship, provide support, connect and learn from each other. Team teaching for a week with teachers throughout this past year has been the best work of my life. The feedback, experience and learning have been profound. The growth in relationships have blossomed because of the face to face conversations, time spent together, and supporting each other. A passion of mine is leadership through modeling. What I expect from teachers should be exactly what I expect of myself. It is imperative that leaders realize the value of working alongside teachers in the classroom and allowing them the time to professionally learn within assignable hours. It has been the foundation of the growth of our school culture and has impacted everything and everyone in the most positive way. This culture curriculum and workshop that I am in the process of building is for leaders to have a starting point or a structure to start from and to provide support in order to be more visible in the walls of a classroom.
This is a curriculum that could be done with superintendents, principals, learning leads, teacher leaders, etc. My goal was to make it tangible within different schools throughout all types of demographics. It provides a scope and sequence guide that develops action plans to enhance teacher and leadership practice, wellness, workshop practice, assessment for learning and school culture to improve student learning overall.
We, as leaders, expect our teachers to adapt and work with different learning styles to spark a joy of learning and motivation within our kids. Yet we sometimes forget to model that same expectation of ourselves. They have these exact same needs and so we have to take care of our teachers because they are the ones who hold our leaders of the world.
I have learned through this process that it goes way beyond the curriculum to encompass the inner workings of a human being. Wellness and workings of the mind are the control centers that impact all of the islands of what are important to us as individuals. The stories behind the eyes are what will shift change, mindset, and spark the motivation and purpose that have been waiting to be awoken this whole time. We have to take care of all of our people instead of constantly piling more and more on top of them. Overwhelm can take down the strongest of structures.
We need to show up, take action and be relentless and that is what I hope these lesson plans, curriculum and workshops will stir up. I am imagining there will be resistance at first. I imagine some of our leaders will have the argument that it is harder in an elementary school than a junior/high school or demographics may come into play. I expect the biggest concern will be time. That is why I allowed for scaffolding, autonomy and tons of time for work, conversation and collaboration.
I know this is hard work. It should be. I am hoping that leaders will see that this matters and that small change is still change. I want to give them tools, to learn from them, and to snuff out the excuses and ignite the possibilities in order to start taking action. I want to surround myself with people who will innovate, struggle, and be relentless. I want to shift a divisional culture, a school culture, and most importantly each person so that can feel joy in their lives and in their work again. I have a lot of work to do.
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