A Commitment to EducationFrom Farm to Mountaintop:
My Goals in Educational Leadership I was raised in a small town in Iowa, a state known for sweet corn festivals, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, an abundance of strawberries, and families committed to supporting academic excellence. I lived in a modest house that bustled with school energy. I spent my young and adolescent years crouched in a kitchen booth, listening to my mother, a middle school teacher, and her colleagues plan interdisciplinary units of study, debate state policy, create extra-curricular programs on a shoe-string budget, and support one another emotionally with strategies for students who needed support. This blurred home/school environment elucidates my adult presence, a teacher and parent driven to participate in co-creating with children a life of learning in a supportive, evolving system. After pursuing a degree in literature, I moved into corporate education in the pharmaceutical and energy industries and worked hard to strengthen my communication and leadership skills. I evolved as both a student and teacher of Deming’s Quality Improvement Process, Covey’s Time Management System, and various corporate computer system designs. I moved up into a management position and found joy in developing one-on-one relationships within a team of sales support staff. I offered many opportunities to my staff for self-improvement, team building, and career advancement. This position as a department manager gave me critical insights into the challenges of learning styles, varied work ethics, communication misunderstandings, and general political imbalances that occur in all systems. I took responsibility for the consequences of decisions that others disagreed with or were negatively impacted by, such as the downsizing of the department. I was initiated into the responsibilities of an empathic but strong leader. After becoming a parent, I moved from corporate education into a middle school classroom . . . and it was like finding the “Golden Ticket.” The chocolate factory? A room-filled with 6th-8th grade students eager to devour meaning in themselves and their worlds. The candy? Literature, history, government systems, and poetry. For over a decade, I have been able to encompass my background in business systems with school models that foster creativity, in-house development of curriculum, and an array of choice teaching opportunities. In my interdisciplinary class of Language Arts/History, I wrote, read, studied, created, performed, and questioned right alongside my students. I continue to teach with the firm dedication to do, be and become what I am asking of my students. Beyond the classroom, however, my school’s leadership and governance model has allowed me to exercise my strengths as a visionary and change agent. My energy to continuously improve my teaching practices has existed in parallel to my work within an entire school. These efforts have nourished me because I so firmly believe in the pillars of an excellent school model: a solid mission of learning, teacher-directed leadership, academic excellence, commitment to quality, innovation, service, collaborative/community-based goals and relationship-based teaching. My studies at The University of Colorado Denver School of Education and Human Development have focused on development of meaningful school goals and community engagement programs, as well as new and improved models for restorative justice, and 21st century skills in curricular models in the classroom. I am committed to contribute to ongoing innovations in education whether it is studying a new poet in class, designing a new outdoor education program, or learning about educational policy. I live by the values I was raised with, in a setting that purported wondrous possibilities – an ear of the sweetest corn was, to me, the product of the kindest of hands, the warming sun, and a community of hope. I ate enough of those ears of corn to see it as my personal analogy to education. Education, too, is a business of nourishment. It requires a fundamental belief in the environment to provide the essential ingredients for growth. Our hands, whether the hands of the educator, administrator, or the student, have to dig deeply, plant tenderly, and harvest together the product of hard work. In this political and economic time, when the community wavers from hope to despair about the quality of our country’s education, I am committed to keep planting, keep tending, keep harboring in the sun, the rain and plenty of soft butter. |