And the journey begins…

I finally have time to reflect on what Kenan Fellows will mean for me.  I guess to understand this totally, one must first know when my Kenan journey began…

In many ways, my journey to Kenan started over 7 years ago as a pre-service teacher.  I was blessed to be paired with the BEST cooperating teacher in the world- John Heffernan.  During the 2005-2006 school year, Mr. Heffernan was serving as a 3rd grade teacher at Forest View Elementary in Durham, NC.  From day 1, he showed me why he was a Master teacher- always challenging and exciting our students.  And I confidently say OUR students because Mr. Heffernan worked hard to mold and shape me into the leader and professional in the classroom; assuring me that I had a stake in ensuring that each and everyone of our 3rd graders achieved major growth while in our class.  Not many educators are skilled and confident enough in their professional talent and worth to open up their classroom to others the way that Mr. Heffernan did.  His confidence in me made me step up the plate and motivated me to begin to do everything in my power to ensure that I began to develop into the best educator possible.

During the first semester of being in awe of the expertise of my cooperating teacher, I learned that Mr. Heffernan had recently been honored as a Kenan Fellow.  With the business that came with being a double major in a professional school, learning how to put theory into practice in the classroom, along with attempting to enjoy my senior year, I had little time to even try to fully understand what being a Kenan Fellow meant.  But I did know that it came with hard work in the profession and understood that Mr. Heffernan was well-deserving of such an honor.

Now fast-forward to 2011-2012.  ALL teachers in my county received an email about the Kenan Fellow application.  I went back and forth about applying for a fellowship, but decided against it last minute.  My mentor (my mother- a fabulous, retired educator) and I decided that I needed to focus on achieving National Boards.  So my goal became applying during the 2012-13 school year.

Thankfully, I was blessed to find out that I achieved National Board certification in November of 2012, which put me right on track with applying to Kenan Fellowship.  When applications came out, I was focused!  I chose my top 2 fellowships and applied!  The rest is history….

Now back to where I started with this blog: pondering what this honor will mean to my educational journey.  For one, I know that it will mold into a better educator.  Already, Kenan has blessed me with collaboration with other highly-motivated, highly-skilled educators throughout the state.  It has also made amazing trainings possible for me.  For example, I am now slated to attend a June 2013 training sponsored by the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) on Lesson Planning and Text Complexity.  Even the application taught me planning strategies for choosing text that I will be able to implement in the classroom.  If I learned this much from the application, I can only imagine what I’ll learn from the 3-day training!

I look forward to this next year of the fellowship!  The possibility are definitely endless….