Sunday, June 30, 2013

This One Time, At NCCAT…We Turned the World Around


            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.”



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