by Jeff Fouquet, Leading Educators Fellow in Kansas City, Cohort 2012
As a classroom teacher and aspiring administrator, I love borrowing
ideas from great teachers and effective schools. During my two-year
teacher-leader fellowship, Leading Educators has offered me countless
opportunities to evaluate and improve my educational impact, but one of the
most eye-opening experiences in all of my Fellowship has been the School Visits
Trip (to Chicago) last winter.
Visiting schools in communities much more diverse and disadvantaged
than my own helped me see that everywhere, regardless of how they are portrayed,
children are children, and they will
respond positively to the efforts and support of tireless, caring adults.
Witnessing schools that have instituted strong rituals of “community” or
“celebration” helped me think about what my own building and district were
doing to associate learning with pride and a shared sense of success.
Similarly, having my knock on each classroom door greeted by a young student
who stepped into the hallway, shook my hand, told me what class it was and the topic
of the lesson before asking if I had any questions was pivotal in my rethinking
of who owns the classroom and whose space it is. More than any other
investigation of effective educational cultures, the School Visits Trip proved to
me that in the best schools, even the small decisions reflect a deeply held
conviction that every student can experience remarkable academic growth.
As the next School Visits Trip approaches, I am excited
for all the great learning and growth the new cohort of Leading Educators will
experience—so excited, in fact, that I am going with them, to New Orleans this
year, to see if I can learn even more from those teachers and schools. Although there are no perfect models,
each exposure to new ideas challenges teachers and administrators to revise
their own measures of success – and that is the attitude that any enterprise
seeking continuous improvement requires.
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