With a title like that, this post has a lot to live up to. I want to preface this post with a
disclaimer that no American Pie-esque adventures happened at the North Carolina
Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT) in Cullowhee. What did happen consisted of seventeen
outstanding teachers, the majority of whom were Teachers of the Year from their
districts, including six regional finalists, meeting at the top of a mountain
to hone their leadership skills in their classrooms, in their schools, and in
their communities. Each teacher left
feeling empowered to return to his or her school district and work on
implementing positive change to help reform curriculum in our schools, improve
teacher morale, and most importantly, impact the lives of the students we teach.
So often
when you hear people talk about NCCAT, you hear them talk about how rejuvenated
they feel when they return, how delicious the food was, and how much fun they
had being with other teachers. While
those descriptions do describe NCCAT, the experience is about so much more than
these more surface-level descriptions. I
think one reason why so many teachers speak about NCCAT in generalizations is
that the experience touched them in too profound of a way to completely
verbalize those experiences to others who were not there. Therefore, it becomes much easier to talk
about the tangible experiences that all people can understand—educators and
non-educators. Today, I want to put
forth my best attempt to describe what NCCAT is really about.
The one
word that best describes my experience at NCCAT is “OPEN.” Both of NCCAT’s campuses are in open,
beautiful, serene, natural surroundings—the mountains and the sea. The openness of the locales is further
fostered by the openness of the instructors to shape and mold the agenda based
on the needs of the teachers who are there.
The experiential learning style of NCCAT encourages and fosters this
fluid scheduling. We completed every
activity planned for us during the week, but our questions, concerns, and other
professional objectives were also valued and inserted into our schedule in
order to give us the best possible professional learning environment.
Not only
was the environment open, but the required homework we had to complete prior to
attending, the activities, the reflective writing, and small group discussions
helped to foster an open mind in all of the attendees. If you arrive at NCCAT (or anywhere
associated with education) with a closed mind and are unwilling to open it to
new possibilities in your classroom, then you are really going to miss out on a
critical component of teaching—you should never stop learning. Every person in attendance during my week at
NCCAT left with numerous ideas about ways to connect with students, parents,
and other educators. We learned how to
lead by being a part of a team, how to facilitate and encourage support from
others, and how to provide essential feedback and foster relationships to help
all of our students succeed. These are
concepts that all teachers know on paper, but once you actually experience
these concepts, it suddenly seems much more important to implement them in your
own classroom. It forces you to take
theory and turn it into practice.
One of the
most impactful experiences with these concepts occurred during an experiential
learning activity based on some of the classic team building exercises: getting
all members across a series of stones without ever having a stone without a
foot on it, moving a tennis ball by pulling on a series of strings to support
it, etc. For each activity, two team
members were placed at a distinct disadvantage—one was blindfolded and one was
not allowed to speak. Upon completing
these challenging exercises, we reflected on what we experienced. We all realized that we devoted our time to
the person who was blindfolded to help them with the task, but almost always
ignored the person who could not speak.
Think about how true that can be in a classroom with students or in a
school among coworkers. We often devote
our time and efforts to the students or coworkers who make it clear that they
are having difficulty or are incapable of completing something without
assistance. There are so many other
students and coworkers who need assistance, but are unable to voice their needs
for different reasons, whether due to a disability, fear, shyness, or lack of
information. We all started to reflect
on the students and teachers who don’t always speak or get to speak in our
lives, and thought about ways that we could reach out to those people so that
they do not fall through the cracks. It
was only through an open mind that we were able to examine the flaws within our
own practices as teacher leaders.
The last
area where we learned to be open was with our hearts. I don’t know if our group was particularly
united due to increasingly low morale and a feeling that teachers must unite
together in order to change some negative portrayals of teachers in the media
and in legislation, but everyone was so open with their struggles, fears, concerns,
and accomplishments during the week. We
laughed, we cried, we hugged, we conquered a whitewater rafting trip as a team,
and we broke through one-inch thick pine boards with our bare hands to
symbolize our desire to break through our personal barriers to success. I heard teachers share concerns about devoting
more time to their students than their own children; teachers who were
struggling to take care of aging, ill parents; teachers who were adopted at an
early age; teachers whose children were recently diagnosed with different
spectrums of autism; teachers who were debating about leaving the profession or
moving to another state; teachers who grew up with a parent in jail; and
teachers who suffered from severe illnesses during the past year and felt guilty
for not being with their students.
As we shared our stories, I
immediately thought of how different and how similar we all are. Our personal experiences are not unique just
to this group of teachers, but can be found among teachers across the state. Perhaps most significantly, this range of
backgrounds also represents the diverse students we serve in public education
in North Carolina. Inspired by our
mountain surroundings, I couldn’t help but to use the metaphor of a
patchwork quilt to describe the teachers at NCCAT, the teachers in North Carolina,
and the students and families we serve in this state. Like the varying fabric squares on an
old-fashioned patchwork quilt, each educator brings a unique backstory, a
unique set of skills, and a unique pedagogical goal to the hodgepodge of public
education. Our students and their
families also bring a unique story, culture, and set of needs. It is only through our unified effort that we
can stitch together all of the disparate pieces into a true masterpiece—a
masterpiece that is one finished product but also recognizes the true beauty in
allowing each piece of cloth to bring its own irreplaceable contribution to the
greater educational fabric. Being at
NCCAT made me realize that while we certainly need accountability and
consistency in education, we also need to recognize and make the most of the
varied strengths that we all bring to the masterwork.
Finally, I would like to end with
the words of the song we sang at NCCAT that truly represent what we all took
from our experience there and our goals as we return to our home school
districts:
“
We come to the mountain, the mountain, the mountain
Go back from the mountain,
Turn the world around.”
