A legacy

Dave and I have no children. That was a choice and we do not regret it. However, I have about 75 to 100 "kids" a year. Many of them are trying at times, but I love working with them. Some of them, though, become very special to me.

A case in point is the young woman in the picture above. I had her in one or another of my classes for four years. I directed her in plays. We became close. So close that she once inadvertently called me "mama." I loved that.

She became an English teacher, and just this week got her Master's degree (with honors) from the City College of New York. She wrote the following to me after I sent her my congratulations and told her how proud I was of her. "Thank You Ms. Doughty! I had an amazing time :) And thanks for being the best English teacher ever and inspiring me to be a pretty darn good one myself :)"

That's a pretty good legacy, if I do say so myself.

The Leadership Role

I don't often think of myself as a leader. In fact, I generally prefer to be the "power behind the throne" as it were. If I lived in the past, I might be a court adviser, but I would never be the ruler. So I find myself in an odd position when it comes to the leadership role.

I prefer to lead by example. I do not want to push change on people, but when I see an option for using technology to "work smarter," I mention it. For example, our family and consumer sciences teacher was doing a unit called "From Steer to Steak." She had typed out and photocopied a collection of links for students to use while researching this subject. I happened to run into her in the teacher's room and I asked her about it. I said, "You know, you could put all these links on a wikispace and then the student's could just sign on and click the links." She was immediately intrigued and we made a date for me to come down and show her how to set up a wikispace. Some teachers have been receptive to this, others have not.

In addition, I have found that, come the fall, I will be the Department Head for the English Department at MVHS. I'm a little nervous. I know that I will be able to keep things organized and on track for the most part. I love to plan and organize. However, I will now be in the vanguard, no hiding behind others. It's a little nervewracking for me. But this is another examle of "working smarter." I love our current department head, but he will be the first one to admit that he is a bit...scattered. I love to organize and plan, so I think that I will be able to do a better job about keeping the department informed about what I call "administrivia." I also want to keep pushing technology. During this course, I have found so many wonderful sites that help teachers "work smarter, not harder." I hope my department members may find them useful.

Stage 3--Collaboration

I met with Chris to discuss stage 3 and I showed him all of my stage 3 work. He was impressed with the variety of assessments that I was planning on using. Much of our conversation centered around trying to access all varieties of learning styles in one assessment.

I explained what Dr. Grace had said about the different learning styles and I also mentioned how I found myself thinking more creatively about assessments when I had to utilize and incorporate all the different learning styles in a single assessment piece.

Chris is more of a lecture/Socratic seminar kind of guy, but he also devises many activities and assessments that contain different projects that the students can choose. We spent some time discussing this and I emphasized that this student choice was a great thing as students could play to their strengths and choose projects that were of interest to them.

We also discussed the fact that, when given choice, many students tend to still choose the traditional paper and pencil (or in this day and age, word processing) kind of assessments. I gave him an example of my recent Lord of the Flies assessment. Students could choose to have their assessment be an essay, poster, PowerPoint, iMovie or other product. However, 99% chose to do a traditional essay. We talked about why that might be, and how we might encourage our students to think outside the box.

I left the templates for Chris, after I explained how to use them. We worked together on filling out the first one, and he, when he had some more free time, was going to work on the rest. This is a very busy time of year for Chris, since he is also, in addition to his many other duties, Senior class advisor. I did not want to overburden him.