The Marshall County Village: District-wide Collaboration

In mid December, I received a forwarded email from my principal. Our new superintendent, Dr. Lela Hale, wanted us to meet at Byhalia High School on our January 5th teacher workday, section off by grade level and subject, and share a best practice example with our fellow teachers. I remember rolling my eyes as I backed out of the email: there was no way I was putting together a presentation over my winter break.

Professional development instructions outlined by Dr. Hale and forwarded to the teachers and staff in the district.*

            Although I technically followed through on that thought – I promise, I brought my laptop and had material to share if needed! – I found Dr. Hale’s professional development to be thoughtful.

            We started the meeting with a discussion of the different types of teacher/administrative leaders: runners, joggers, walkers, and so on. (This all somehow correlated to these types of people riding a bus, with the administrators being the bus drivers. At the time, this all made sense, but upon reflection, the metaphor became labored.) Listening to what Dr. Hale had to say about leadership in schools and her expectations for student learning, lesson plans (she encouraged everyone to write out detailed lesson plans and said she was working on a district-wide format!), community involvement, and professional attire, I thought we might have a good leader in charge of our district.

            After her introduction, we broke off into our grade-level/subject groups. I was in a classroom with the other 7^th and 8^th grade ELA teachers in my district (Landon Pollard supervising and Liz Towle waving hello as she passed by). As a group, we discussed specific issues we faced in our middle school ELA classrooms. We posed each issue to the group and the recorder wrote them down on a larger sheet of paper. Once we voiced our issues, the group shared ideas and solutions for dealing with the various issues. I walked away with some ideas to try and/or consider for my own classroom.

Our notes from the 7th/8th Grade ELA professional development room.*

            When you are working in your school and trying not to get buried under all the grading, lesson planning, and documentation, you sometimes forget you are not an island. You are not functioning alone in your school and definitely not within the district. I appreciated the way Dr. Hale brought all the teachers together and gave us the opportunity to collaborate with others outside our school, but within our district. I think our school district could benefit from more collaboration among the schools, the administrators, and the teachers. My only hope is that Dr. Hale doesn’t stop with this one workday. To have a lasting impact on teachers within the district and to foster further collaboration, we will need district-wide workdays more frequently and more consistently planned.

*Hindsight is 20/20. I'm wishing now I had taken picture of the 7th/8th Grade ELA room, but I wasn't thinking at the time, "Ah yes, this event would make for a great response to our next blog post so I should take some pictures." These pictures are are the best I got, sorry!