This post is week 3 of 8 in the 8 Weeks of Summer Blog Challenge for educators. This week’s prompt asks “How are you both a leader and a follower in your career?”

(Please excuse any typos in this one-it is a first draft that I rushed out during my daughters’ nap time because my time to write has been nonexistent this week! I will edit later, probably.)

My response relates a lot to what I wrote in my previous post in which I focused on the role the Eastern Michigan Writing Project (EMWP) has played in my career so far. The EMWP is central to how I see myself both as a leader and as a follower.

I am a teacher-leader through the EMWP. I have had many opportunities to lead, which to me mostly means learning alongside other teachers as I facilitate learning opportunities for them. After going through the Summer Institute in 2012, I became a mentor for other teachers who took part during the following summer, and I have continued to serve as a mentor for new teacher consultants ever since. I was also the co-facilitator for the Summer Institute in 2016.

Currently, I am a thinking partner and frequent facilitator for EMWP’s College, Career, and Community Ready Writers Program (C3WP) site. We have been working with a rural school in Madison, Michigan for the past year to help build up their students’ nonfiction reading and argument writing skills using the C3WP mini-units. This year, we will also be working with teachers who are in an ELL master’s program on the same thing. My work with the C3WP also helped me complete my Master’s Project and publish my first article in the Language Arts Journal of Michigan.

The EMWP model of teacher leadership really emphasizes that we learn alongside others as we lead. We model lessons for other teachers where they take on the role of students, and the teachers we work with often pose questions that make me think critically and deeply about why I do things the way that I do. I become a better teacher from thinking things through with other teachers. In addition, we analyze student work together in the C3WP cohorts. That has been huge for my growth as a teacher, and it was this type of analysis that I did in my article. We look for common issues that students have in their writing, and we talk about next steps that could help individual students, or whole classes of students. We really are not teacher leaders who have all of the answers, but rather leaders who are still learning ourselves.

With that mindset of being a learning leader, I have also become even more of a follower. I look to other teachers in my building, as well as those who publish books or articles or who speak at conferences for ideas to help me continue learning and growing.

This year was my first one in a new district, and so I looked to my district-assigned mentor for a lot of guidance. She is a wonderful veteran teacher with a kind heart and a soft-spoken manner, and I think (I hope) that her teaching style is already pretty similar to mind. I also looked to my next door neighbor teacher, who I knew before I came to the district-we met through EMWP, of course. She was in her final year of teaching this year, and we were lucky enough to share the same planning period first semester. We did a lot of coplanning, and it helped me feel like I fit right in. I’m also in awe of my department chair. She is an incredible advocate for our department, and the more I get to know her, the more I know I have a lot to learn from her.
When it comes to the people I follow, I think I also have to mention my EMU advisor and friend Cathy Fleischer. I think I want to be her when I grow up. She is an incredible advocate for literacy education, not to mention education in general. She is for me the true ideal of a lifetime learner and teacher-leader. I still have a lot to learn about advocacy from her.

And then there are the teacher leaders that I look up to that I do not know personally (yet). Right now, 180 Days by Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle is my bible. I read it last winter, and I plan on revisiting it this August as I prepare for the new school year. My growing Twitter PLN has also been a huge source of inspiration for me this year. I’m so glad that I came back to Twitter last fall. I have learned so much from Monte Syrie, Jeffery Frieden, Mellisa Sawetch, Joy Kirr, Catlin Tucker, and many others.

I think being a follower/learner is crucial to being a teacher leader. We have to recognize that we are never finished learning in order to continue growing and leading others.