9 minute read
Classroom Habits of Reflective Practitioners
Stephanie Walter, MEd, serves as the director of teaching and learning for Mizzou Academy. Throughout over twenty years of teaching, she has taught in public, private, and blended classrooms, meeting students from all over the world and encouraging them as they evolve as writers and learners. During her tenure with Mizzou Academy, Stephanie has authored and coauthored over twenty-five online and blended courses and also led professional development and workshops around the world. Stephanie’s current role affords her the opportunity to develop curriculum, support lead teachers, manage a large team of instructional specialists, and partner with classroom teachers. In these roles, she shares best practices in online and blended education and helps foster student success.
Stephanie holds a bachelor’s degree in secondary language arts from the University of Missouri and completed her master’s degree in creative arts in education through Lesley University.
To book Kathryn Fishman-Weaver or Stephanie Walter for professional development, contact pd@SolutionTree.com.
PREFACE Our Journeys to Blended Education
It was August 2020, and the shadowy trepidation of that specific moment in education was palpable. More than one hundred elementary educators would join us for an orientation workshop on connecting and teaching online in just a few minutes. How do you orient teachers for an unknown and unprecedented school year? Stephanie and I (Kathryn) shared a quick nervous look. I noticed my coffee had turned cold and teachers were beginning to fill the digital waiting room. Stephanie dashed to her refrigerator to grab one more diet soda. It was time to draw on the lessons we had learned from our own experiences teaching and leading in online and blended contexts. As we worked with the elementary teachers in our session that day, we realized this global moment had already transformed education forever.
It was around this time we realized we had a story to share—a story about our experiences teaching and leading in online schools. This led us down a long path of research and reflection, and eventually to the book you are reading right now. However, our own story begins years earlier. It starts with two young women who didn’t know each other yet and who were both still finding their ways. We did not start our careers as teachers, and when we did become teachers, we were both apprehensive about online education. Now, we both serve as administrators for a global blended school system. Origin stories matter. Journeys matter. Here is a little bit about ours.
I remember the exact place I sat on the day I decided I wanted to become a teacher. I was in a sturdy wooden chair surrounded by a loud, rowdy group of ninth-grade students in the classic U-shape—six girls and fifteen boys (most of whom were on the football team). We were reliving our favorite moments from To Kill a Mockingbird, sharing lively opinions about Scout’s first-grade teacher, Miss Caroline, who smelled like peppermint and had questionable teaching methods. I was the teacher, and this was the very last day of my first year of teaching. I knew for certain I had found my happy place, my calling, and my passion—right
in the middle of a rambunctious classroom filled with very opinionated fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds.
Right up to my first year of teaching, I was determinedly set against education as a general career path. As a fifteen-year-old high school student, I was in the middle of an algebra I class, tackling a set of particularly challenging questions, when my teacher overheard me explaining a problem to a friend in the dull roar of group work. Mr. G. said, in the way you might imagine an oracle proclaims the future to a wandering traveler, “You will make a great teacher someday.”
Mr. G. balanced his passion for mathematics with corny jokes in his efforts to spur his young mathematicians to success. I often bothered him for his advice and respected his opinion. This time, though? I didn’t hesitate.
“Oh, no! Being a teacher is the last thing I ever want to do. I can’t even imagine it.”
Years later, I met up with Mr. G. and told him I was teaching language arts to 137 ninth-grade students. The twinkle in his eye returned. “Of course you are,” he said.
How I went from “I would never teach” to “I love to teach” was less a leap than a yearslong acceptance of something I realized exists in the fabric of who I am. I attended the University of Missouri as an eager journalism student with good grades, a love of stories, and high hopes. What I didn’t have was a thirst for competition and the outgoing nature a journalist might need to get the scoop. This introvert quickly realized a career in journalism was not a good fit. Besides a vague dream of becoming a world-traveling author, I had really no direction for a career. So, my path to education began as a hasty declaration: “Well, I love to read, and I like kids. I guess I’ll be an English teacher.”
Three years later, I started work as a junior high language arts teacher in the midsize city of Columbia, Missouri. It was a far cry from my small-town roots, and I was both intimidated and awestruck I had made it this far. My concerns centered on things like, “Can I keep a class under control?” rather than on any excellent teaching strategies I might employ. A little excited and a lot shaky, I decided, if nothing else, I would enjoy traveling this journey with my students. I would do the best I could to share my love of literature and help them begin to express themselves through their own stories. I would fake it until I made it, even if I made it through only one year and then slipped away to pursue another career path.
All of this brings us back to that discussion of the peppermint-scented, well-meaning, misdirected Miss Caroline during the last hour with my first group of students. One feisty student who had both challenged me and given me great joy throughout the year said, “Well, you can’t blame Miss Caroline. She’s a first-year teacher.
They don’t know anything.” I laughed. “You know,” I told her, “I’m a first-year teacher.” The other students looked surprised. She said, “I had no idea! You seem like you’ve been doing this for years.”
And that was the moment I embraced education. Not because I was a “good” teacher. Not because I had effective classroom management skills or could effortlessly lead students through studies of To Kill a Mockingbird or Romeo and Juliet (because that is not effortless). I knew I was in it for good simply because I came home at the end of every day utterly exhausted and ready for more. Something beautiful happens as a group of students and their teacher learn about one another, share the journey through the year, and evolve from one grade to the next. And there I was, living out what I loved most about education. Stories matter. Real life is tangled up with stories, and people connect and press forward through them.
In Mr. G.’s class, I thought I wanted to be a world-traveling author. Who knew becoming an educator would help me later realize that dream? I eventually took on a small role for an online school system, teaching creative writing and high school language arts to students online. That role evolved to lead teacher, to instructional coordinator, to assistant principal, and eventually to director of teaching and learning. In these roles, I’ve had the privilege of meeting with domestic and international students and educators to share the journey to learn together. I’ve written online interactive textbooks for middle school through high school, and now, I’m thrilled to be partnering with my fellow educator and leader of our school district, Kathryn, on the book you hold right now. I am excited to share a new journey with you as we consider the power of connection with our students and how to create magic in the online space.
I didn’t plan on becoming an educator. After college, I moved two thousand miles to Berkeley, California, to work as a publicist for a social justice nonprofit. I told myself I would do this for a couple of years and then I’d start a master’s degree in public health. I believed public health was how I would make a difference in the world. It turns out I was right.
One day taking the Bay Area Rapid Transit home from work, I saw an advertisement recruiting special education teachers to Oakland Public Schools. Something in my thinking aligned, and I realized education is a public health profession.
The CDC Foundation (n.d.) defines public health as:
The science of protecting and improving the health of people and their communities. . . . Overall, public health is concerned with protecting the health
of entire populations. These populations can be as small as a local neighborhood, or as big as an entire country or region of the world.
This is what schoolteachers work toward every day. Educators strive to cultivate cognitive and affective wellness and development, to transform life trajectories, and to promote “equity, quality and accessibility” (CDC Foundation, n.d.). Viewing education as a public health profession is important to our book’s emphasis on people-centered approaches to teaching. It was also important to how I approached my work as a first-grade teacher.
I’ve dedicated my career to working with neurodiverse learners (learners who experience a variation in the human brain regarding sociability, attention, learning, and other mental functions, such as students diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD]), fostering student leadership, and cultivating wholehearted approaches to school leadership. The first person I met when I started my career in public education was a parent leader who often helped families navigate our public systems, including health care. The second person I met was a school secretary who doubled as our school nurse and lead Spanish-English translator. My classrooms have welcomed refugees, immigrants, students with profound medical needs, and students experiencing food insecurity. I’ve worked with students whose parents were told by doctors that their children would likely never achieve functional literacy, and they experienced the miracle of watching those young people prove those claims wrong. My colleagues and I have had the gift and responsibility of being a safe person with whom young people could share their fears and challenges.
I feel at home in school buildings. I love the noise, the flurry of emotions, and the energy of young people surrounding me in the classroom. Therefore, when I received a recruiting call to join an online and blended school system, I wasn’t all that interested. When the caller then shared that this online school system was welcoming thousands of international students, I agreed to a conversation.
Early in the conversation, I came right out and said, “I find online education . . . dehumanizing.”
“Tell me more,” the interviewer replied.
“Well, I am passionate about student leadership, differentiation, student support, service initiatives, and project-based learning. These are all missing from most of the online classes I’ve experienced.”
“What if you could change that?” my interviewer asked.
That wasn’t the response I expected. He continued, sounding genuinely interested in my answer, “Where would you start?”
