Switchboard Operator

Last week was the first week that I felt like I was actually doing the entirety of my job, because up until now I’d been doing all the other parts except going out to teachers’ classrooms to work with them. I’d previously spent the entire last three weeks scheduling the 55 teachers I am lucky enough to collaborate with on a monthly basis. I am supposed to be in their room when students are there for 30 min and ideally back it up to a one-on-one setting with the teacher during a non-student time, which is a lot to manage to collaborate when also considering the 1-5 other teachers I need to see at that school and trying to minimize driving. Anyway, after much shuffling and coordinating, I got it set up and I finally started to get out to room last week.

Having been in about 20 classrooms in that time, I’m starting to realize a few things.

1. We have fantastic teachers in our district! Our kids are so lucky :-)
2. Teachers will never truly know all the amazing things they do with students on a minute-by-minute basis because they can’t step out of themselves, (on video recording or otherwise).
3. The level of support our teachers provide as many students as they possibly can is unbelievable.
4. Everyone teaches SO. SO. differently, and its totally fine.
5. There are so many finer points of teaching that you cannot know right from the get-go; they come bit by bit with years of experience.
6. Our teachers are having “great teacher” moments very regularly, but they so rarely get recognized. (That’s where I come in. I’m loving getting to promote the awesome things teachers are doing on Twitter and elsewhere.)

As I’ve started to collaborate with teachers, I have thoroughly enjoyed what I have now come to understand is the crux of my job. I’m still trying to think of a better analogy, but this is what comes to mind. I feel like I am a switchboard operator. I am not the one having conversations with students anymore, but I’m directing people to tools and strategies they can use in order to have those conversations with students. Here are some examples of the kinds of work I’ve gotten to do with teachers the last couple weeks:

• When someone says, “I’m trying really hard to get all my papers on the iPad,” I can tell them that another teacher told me when she tried going paperless, her class hated her, and that things went much better when it was one of her many tools for engaging students, rather than the only one.
• Or when a 2nd grade teacher told me she was excited to use her iPads, but had only seen upper grade teachers do cool things with tech, I could hook her up with the 1st grade teacher I saw at the previous school who is doing amazing things with tech and her littles.
• Or when someone needed to know how to incorporate a new online component to the curriculum, I could refer her to another teacher who had worked it in in a unique way.
• Or when a teacher was getting bogged down in student requests for help with an app, I shared another teacher’s strategy of explaining it once and then always deferring to other students to answer technical questions about the app.
• Or when a teacher says, I’ve used ipads for a long time, but now I also have access to Chromebooks. How can I use Google tools more effectively with the Chromebooks?

And overall, it’s definitely been fun! I really enjoy having a deep well of knowledge to draw from my own background and experience, as well as having a pretty wide network of people to ask when I don’t have any ideas. It makes everyone’s questions much more fun, because I know I can find an answer, for the most part. So, to all you coaches out there, what analogy would YOU use to describe what you do?

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