In the morning yesterday I heard that our usual Wednesday technology PD was cancelled and in its place we would be having a meeting about our math instruction with my charter school company’s national head of math curriculum and the Chief Operating Officer of the entire international charter school company for which I work. My lead teacher and I briefly discussed and we started to get a bit nervous. My school is kind of acting in a renegade fashion as we have been told to be backward driven in our lessons, planning from the standard backward to the lesson rather than following the curriculum straight through or planning lessons and trying to tie them into state standards. We are the only school in my charter school company who is doing this and without the approval of the national office.
Before the meeting I was observed by these two higher ups during my math lesson. Then we met while our students were at specials and it went fine. All of us teachers were excited about the magical excel documents that they had created to help us decide what to teach next. I didn’t really think much of it.
Today my assistant principal met with my group today to talk about differentiated instruction and she went off on a tangent about me that just caught me off guard. She said that with the debrief meeting at the end of the day the people in the meeting were “raving” about me. They loved my instruction, lesson plans and attitude. She said that my name continued to come up through the meeting. She compared me to her, saying that she only taught at our school for 2 years (and was out sick with a brain tumor for a large chunk of that time) before being asked to be an assistant principal. She said that when you work hard, people are going to notice and people are going to talk and you will be rewarded. Of course all she did was allude, but it was pretty strong alluding.
It feels nice. I was shaking a bit afterward because I was so excited. Not that I have any interest in being in administration. (You think that I work a lot? They work more)
