Instructional Coaching during a Pandemic…check

Thats a wrap on year 14 as an educator as it is officially summer. As I sit here thinking about this past year, I find it difficult to come up with the right words to explain all that entailed. This year certainly tested me in more ways than one. My perseverance, strength, confidence, and positivity were definitely put to a test. This year was one for the record books. There were good days, bad days, and all the days in between.

Highlights: leading the elementary writing instruction committee (a dream of mine since becoming a coach), getting to teach writing model lessons for 2 weeks or a month long genre studies in 9 classrooms throughout our district (one kindergarten, four 1st grades, three 4th grades, one 5th grade…2nd and 3rd were coming but then remote learning happened), learning a TON more about best practices in guided reading instruction in order to support 3 elementary school sin our district, having 446 learning appoints this year (highest to date), attending 4 conferences to make sure we are up to date on best practices so we can not only bring it all back to share with our district but also so we can lead out current professional development, representing DUnlap by presenting at 2 conferences (one of them we were able to lead an entire interactive area for all attendees), and finally helping to create a plan for our district to go from face to face learning to digital learning in 3 days time…then all the support/revisions throughout the last two months.

Work in Progress Moments: I had my fair share of moments this year in learning how to navigate my emotions, conquering difficult situations, and not letting the loud few get me down. I wish I had blogged more and visit more classrooms. I only wrote 20/50 blog posts for the year and due to COVID-19 I had to adapt my goal of visiting 50 classrooms to 34 instead.  I also missed one day of making a daily video recap of the school day.

At the end of the day though, the highlights out number the ehh moments and I’m choosing to focus on how much I learned and grew not only as an educator but as a person! I mean just look at these stats:
I’m thankful for an amazing team who lift me up, support my wild ideas, and who work tirelessly to support everyone in out schools! Peace out year 14 and look out year 15…I’m coming for ya!

Click the image below to watch my end of the year video reflection: