Building My Own Professional Learning Community: Part 2

"If you're the smartest guy in the room, you're in the wrong room."

These are the words I've tried to live by during my 20+ years as a teacher. It's nothing but ego that leads a teacher to think that they've mastered this profession and no longer need to improve. And it blinds too many teachers to the expertise all around them.

It's that drive to absorb the best practices of others that fuels the Build Your Own Professional Learning Community tour that I take during many of my track-out breaks. I want to see other teachers working their magic and learn the strategies that help them motivate and inspire kids. Last week I wrote about the first leg of my #BYOPLC tour—through eastern North Carolina—and now I return with my reflections on a circuit much closer to home.

I teach in the educational behemoth known as the Wake County Public School System, a group of about 200 schools serving about 160,000 K-12 students in the county that surrounds Raleigh, North Carolina. I've worked my entire teaching career in this district, and witnessed many changes over the past two decades. We've moved from being a role model for how to integrate across race and socioeconomic status to using a complex feeder system that is sliding closer and closer to neighborhood (segregated) schools every year.

One of the benefits of a very large district, though, is that there is an amazing diversity of educational spaces. From themed magnet schools to year-round calendar options to early colleges to innovative alternative schools, we really have a school for nearly every unique need or interest. On this tour, I wanted to see that remarkable heterogeneity from the level of individual classrooms. But I also wanted to learn from the best teachers that I know. And so I started with the Kenan Fellows Program for Teacher Leadership list of fellows. I identified five teachers whom I admire greatly (all but one of them past Fellows), and I set out for a fun day on the road.

Stop #1: Justin Osterstrom at Pine Hollow Middle School

I've known Justin for many years and he is my regular choice for brainstorming solutions to classroom problems. Every time I've visited Justin's classroom in the past, I've walked away with a pedagogical trick that I end up using in my own classroom. This year, though, Justin's team got smaller and all of them were forced to teach English Language Arts. I've always known Justin as the consummate science teacher—using analogies and hands-on activities to help his sixth-grade students understand complex ideas with ease—but I couldn't imagine him teaching reading and writing. I knew it would be a fun visit.

What I should have anticipated is that Justin is, above all else, a teacher. I should have know that he would simply bring his charisma and relationship-building skills to the new content. I should have expected that he would find ways to take a potentially boring essay writing assignment and turn it into an interactive group activity, providing exemplar sentences to each group and asking them to assemble the final sample essay. It was genius.

And it didn't hurt that Justin introduced me to his students as a "published author" and implied that I was there, not to learn from Mr. O, but to help the students learn better writing. #powermove

Stop #2: Erica Speaks at Mills Park Middle School

I have known Erica as a friend, teammate, and colleague for my entire teaching career. She has always been a shining example of the impact of good lesson design, right down to creative formatting and thoughtful font choices. In recent years, she has become a #EdTech role model for her colleagues, learning new tools first and then showing others how to integrate them into their lessons.

Like Justin, Erica is facing a new challenge this year. She has moved to a new school that includes a very "Wake County problem": extremely high expectations from families. Erica is accustomed to working with kids who need extra support and she has built a virtual toolbox of tools and strategies to help any child learn to read and write like a middle school pro. But right now her biggest obstacle is finding ways to make her lessons more rigorous to meet the needs of a large number of more advanced students, while simultaneously continuing to support students who need more help. I watched her students complete a blended assignment that met this challenge using self-paced multimedia student work to free Erica up to help individual students who need it.

I'm inspired by the flexibility that she's shown... and I picked up some tech tips, too.

Stop #3: Tiffanni Craig at Holly Springs High School

As my only stop at a high school, I hoped to see in Tiffanni's lesson some examples of what my middle school students would be doing in their future. Knowing Tiffanni's endlessly energetic personality and masterful understanding of physics, I had high expectations. I was not disappointed.

Tiffanni managed the impossible: she got two dozen high school students to get excited about physics. She kept their attention with her questions and encouragement. She explained complicated ideas using a mix of simple analogies and connections to prior learning. And she did it all with her characteristic excitement and emotion. It was amazing.

Stop #4: JeVar Bransome at River Oaks Middle School

Like Erica, JeVar is both a teacher I've worked with before and a Kenan Fellow. He has worked in many different schools, serving a wide range of students from grade 6 all the way to high school seniors. The reason that I wanted to visit JeVar, though, is that he represents a style of teacher that I aspire to be: a coach.

I have never served as a coach—in the sports sense of the word or any other—but I think that I need to be more of one to reach many of the kids that I am teaching right now. I need to be able to help them find the motivation to focus. I need to be able to help them see their progress. I need to be able to help them set goals.

And so I visited JeVar at the alternative middle school where he is currently coaching students to learn science after they've experienced failure in other places. I watched him hold them to high expectations and encourage them to dig deeper. And I listened to him treat them with respect through it all.

And I made a pact with myself to take these practices back to my own classroom.

Stop #5: Monica Wale at Durant Road Middle School

I ended my day at the school where I started my career. There, between hugs with old friends, I had a chance to learn from Monica Wale. Monica was a PLC-mate of mine in the past. I worked with her at a time when she was teaching both Math and Science, and I was amazed at her ability to take a Science lesson and make it better even when the content was less comfortable for her.

Fast-forward a few years and Monica is now the Science Department Chairperson at Durant. She is thriving in a tough environment with a combination of creativity (like using different shaped blocks to help a visually-impaired student learn about balancing chemical equations) and playful sarcasm. Every student wants to do their best for her because she shows that she cares. Whether dressing in Christmas pajamas for spirit week or challenging a student to benchpress more than her, Monica forges critical connections to every child. And all the while she provides some of the most innovative lessons I have ever seen.

Now, if I can just convince her to apply for a Kenan Fellowship....

Looking back on two days of visiting classrooms in different parts of North Carolina and watching great teachers do their thing, I have to say that I am jazzed about getting back into my own classroom. I've seen so many exciting lessons and walked around inside so many innovative schools. My batteries are charged now and I'm ready for another nine weeks of trying to be the best teacher than I can be for my kids.