During my Kenan Fellowship, the greatest thing I’ve learned isn’t a single fact or skill.  The greatest thing I’ve learned is that NC has a community of truly excellent educators willing to collaborate.  I have encountered these educators through the Kenan Fellows program, through my Home Base group within the program, through DPI and in conferences which I have attended to present for DPI.

World language and fine arts teachers at the middle and elementary school level are often isolated within their schools.  Whether your subject holds district-wide departmental meetings or professional learning communities varies by district, so you may be on your own for the majority of the time.  Years of being in this environment has pushed me to be largely self-sufficient, which is a good thing, but also has its downside.

Through my externship, I have encountered generosity of spirit both in educators in NC and in the wealth of teacher-created resources shared online that I have evaluated and tagged for Home Base.  I am impressed with the amount of time and effort that teachers put in to give all students a better education: hours and hours formatting and uploading lesson plans to web pages, creating videos to explain content, answering e-mails from colleagues within the profession, and just sitting down to chat and share ideas.

The most important thing that I have learned is that, in a state in which it becomes more difficult to teach every day and in which the future of education hangs so delicately in the balance between left and right, I am not alone.  Whether local, regional, state, or virtual, there are communities of educators sharing and generating new ideas to make teachers’ and students’ experiences richer.