First of all, I have to say that I feel really lucky for having Dr. Tammy Howard as my mentor—Emily, Sue, and I have talked about it often. She is a busy woman at the head of accountability–one of the busiest (if not THE busiest) departments at DPI, and, by taking on a group of teachers as her mentees, I believe she made a strong statement about her investment in teachers.
Tammy used to be a teacher, and it shows. We were amazed that we got the chance to sit in her office (the head office!) and tell her our REAL opinions about the MSLs! It speaks to what kind of person she is that we felt like we could be candid with her. I saw throughout the summer that she treats her staff the same way; she was always patient, friendly, and had a kind word and a moment for everyone, even though every minute of her day is double scheduled to the minute. In addition to being kind, it is immediately apparent that she is extraordinarily intelligent and capable at her job, which made it even more of an honor that she wanted to hear our perspective as teachers.
We did a lot of work independently while in the office, which was challenging at first. However, I ended up seeing this as an asset, because she took the time to set us up for success beforehand. She arranged for us to have a cubicle right in the middle of the department, so I got to network with those in the surrounding cubicles. We were expected to be in the office daily full-time (with, of course, concessions for our different summer schedules), which became an opportunity to get to know the people, the building, events going on, and Raleigh in general. I also learned what a real commute is like (and am thankful to be back to my 15-minute drive on empty roads).
Most invaluably, she also set us up meetings during our first week of the summer with some of the major players in accountability, curriculum, and test development, which meant when I had questions, I could go up to people who already knew my face (and even more importantly, who knew that I was working with Tammy, which was honestly sometimes necessary to make things happen!). As I was working on developing the draft of our initial survey, I also formed a relationship with a sort of second mentor, a DPI statistician named Charles Lanier who Tammy recommended I collaborate with. He helped me through the entire process and was such a positive influence that I plan on including his name in our project’s credits.
By our final meeting, Tammy commented on the fact that I seemed to be on a first-name basis with half the office (oh, well Charles and I were discussing that possibility….yes, Jennifer had asked about that…). Basically, I felt like I had an office full of mentors, all with different perspectives, personalities, and specialties. I also feel like the independence has created a strong team among Emily, Sue, and I, which has been an asset to keeping the project moving, especially now that we’re out of the office and back in the classroom.
Emily, Sue, and I have a lot of work ahead of us—the survey we are implementing, which is gathering teacher opinions on the MSLs and DPI in general, is going into the email boxes of every NC teacher on Monday (!!!!!!!). Once the teachers take it (please take it!!!), we will be analyzing all the data and creating products to share our results with both DPI and teachers. I feel confident that this project will have an interesting, useful, and positive impact, and we couldn’t have done it without Tammy’s smart orchestration of our independence. She has also taken the time in the past month to ensure that our survey is going out on time in the exact way it needs to be in order to ensure validity and as high a response as possible. This would have never been possible without her intervention.
This is the department of accountability’s first year having Kenan Fellows in the office, and I hope they do so again. As I wrote in an earlier post, I think we need more DPI “Teacher Ambassadors,” and Tammy, along with the rest of the department, really came through in making that happen. I can’t wait to see them all again to present them with our final results.