What would a teacher do?

Even in deciding what to title this blog, we asked ourselves this question and did some research. How do you name your blog? The basic process we discovered was to write down all of the topics we wanted to discuss in our blog. Our list looked something like this

• Teacher Empowerment
• Professional Development that really works
• Tech tools to help in the classroom
• New teacher development/Mentoring
• Intervention programs for students
• Advisory programs
• Connecting with others in education
• GRIT
• Teacher Retention
• Teacher Buy-In
• Lesson Planning/Strategies for the classroom

This list felt broad and not very helpful in narrowing down a title until we started discussing how we would address each topic on our blog.

It all came back to teacher empowerment.

The more we broke down each topic, the more we realized our blog would be answering the question, “What would a teacher do with this if they had the option to take control?”.

We have been very lucky in the past couple of years to find ourselves in very empowering roles developing a teacher-run advisory class to meet the needs of our high school students as well as being elected as representatives on a teacher-pd committee for our district and building. Throughout the past year, we have loved having the opportunity to come up with an idea and run with it.

When we are given the autonomy to ask ourselves “What would a teacher do if they could plan pd for their building?” or “What would a teacher do given class time twice a week to try to meet students’ needs for personal and professional growth?” and we actually get to answer those questions and see it play out, it’s amazing.

Successful or not, we are learning a lot and enjoying our jobs a million times more.

And so we landed on the name, What Would A Teacher Do?, because we believe it is a fundamental question to ask ourselves when making decisions or trying new things in education.

So check back every Monday as we dive into the topics listed above (and more!) and ask ourselves, “What would a teacher do?”.