Making Room on Your Plate

It is no secret that teachers have a full plate.  It is no secret that they take work home beyond school hours.  No matter how efficient and a how organized teachers are, there is never enough time to get everything done in one day.  Things get put on the back burner.  It isn’t because teachers don’t try, or don’t have good intentions.  Time is our enemy.

One advantage of having a teacher leadership program is having human resources to help accomplish tasks that teachers can’t get to.  Now that doesn’t mean we are personal servants, but instead co- workers who can help take a few things off your plate and re-organize that plate to be easier for you to sit down and take a bite out of.  Our full time coaching staff has utilized several Coaching Books as resources.  One of the first books we had all our coaches read was Taking the Lead by Joellen Killion and Cindy Harrison. They have since authored another book titled:  Coaching Matters  In this book she lists ten roles that coaches can take on. Follow the link below to see those roles

http://learningforward.org/docs/coachingmatters/killiontoolch5-4.pdf

As long as our coaching staff are staying within the guidelines of these roles, we gage their work to be in the coaching realm.  This year all of our coaches have taken on several of these roles.  Our Technology Integration Coaches have spent a large portion of our school year as Learning Facilitators.  The elementary Technology Coaches have diligently spent this year attacking ways to train our staff on the use of the Mimio teach bars, as well as helping them learn tools to utilize the software to create lessons with our JOURNEYS Literacy Curriculum.  This lesson planning work has been done by our Technology Coaches and our fourteen curriculum facilitators. 

Rachel Morris,  a fourth grade teacher at Novak Elementary, and Curriculum Facilitator, partnered with her building Instructional Strategist, Kim Ophoff.  They worked extensively on science lessons that interacted with the mimio software.  After seeing the work they collaborated on, Jessica Zimmerman, Technology Integration Coach was brought into the conversation and the three began to organize a day and a half of planning time to work with other district Curriculum Facilitators.  Over the days they were split in two small groups and created the template/skeleton lesson for teachers to use with either Mimio or SmartBoard software.  This work has been collaborative, and meaningful. The beauty of it is ALL our district can benefit from this work.  Every teacher K-5 can utilize the plans to go with their grade level Journeys Curriculum.  This in turn benefits ALL of the Elementary classrooms and students.

I had the privilege of popping in to both days of training and the energy and dedication to the work was inspiring.  People worked hard showcasing their expertise and others worked equally at learning a new strategy and skill to create the lessons. 

I’m certain this work would have eventually happened, over the course of several years, but collectively our district was able to attack this project and it will be complete by the end of the year. Lessons that are done can be utilized immediately, and the rest will be in the hopper waiting for the teachers when school opens this fall.

We'd like to thank the Elementary Technology Coaches:  Ryan Gotto, Karla Koenen, Jessica Zimmerman for their work on this project as well as the following elementary curriculum facilitators:

WF-Juli Wirtjes(K-2)

WF- Sarah Doyle(3-5)

BW-Amanda Goodlove(K-2)

BW-Jill Brockshink(3-5)

LG-Karissa Brincks(K-2)

LG-Jennifer Hammes(3-5)

IC-Jen Dechant(K-2)

IC-Colleen Fritz (3-5)

WE-Lori Manley(K-2)

WE-Betsy Bushlack(3-5)

NE-Jill Paulson(K-2)

NE-Rachel Morris(3-5)

EH-Tara Seery((K-2)

EH-Sarah Russel(3-5)