The Fellow/Mentor parternship within the Kenan program is extremely beneficial for all parties.  Most partnerships are within STEM fields, since this is the orginal focus of the Kenan Fellows Program.  My partnership was with NC DPI, so it’s a little different, but the benefits are the same.

As fellows, we gain skills and connections from our partnerships.  Fellows are participating in new research that they can use in their lessons, and learning new techniques that they can pass on to students, such as propagation of venus fly traps in one partnership.  Having fellows exposed to this research and techniques puts them on the cutting edge as teachers– having current knowledge about a field from real-life experiences instead of text books will increase the enthusiasm and the accuracy of their teaching.  Having students exposed to the products, practices, and processes of each of these fellowships is so enlightening.  Having students design the labels for muscadine grape smoothies, for example, could spark a kid’s interest in marketing, graphic design, or sustainable agriculture.  In non-STEM partnerships, such as with DPI, fellows have the opportunity of a connection at the state level.  All teachers are affected by state mandates.  Fellows get to have an effect on the mandates themselves through the projects and partnerships they create.

It’s not just teachers and students that benefit.  There are advantages for the businesses and institutions that are our partners.  Students are their future work force.  The work that fellows are doing can push a student in a certain direction within that work force, either by simply exposing them to a growing field they hadn’t heard of, or by allowing them hands-on experiences that they can build on in the future.  Kenan Fellow lessons can put a student on the road to biotechnology or microbiological research.  What could have easily been a ‘Careers in Sciences’ textbook sidebar with an outdated photograph, uninteresting or unattainable for many students, can now be a student’s reality for that day or that unit.

It’s mutually beneficial for North Carolina institutes and businesses to have their knowledge and skills imparted upon North Carolina students who will soon become our working citizens.  Teachers and school administrators often push for more parent involvement.  This gives a support structure for the present–who’s monitoring homework at home, who’s helping younger students with time management, who’s instilling values and consequences.  Kenan parternships create a support structure for these students’ and our state’s future– who those students will be in ten years, and helping NC fill the need for a skilled workforce with an ever-growing STEM inclination.

Having completed all three professional development sessions of my Kenan Fellows program, I feel like I have grown in two major arenas: advocacy and improvement.  I know that it sounds odd to say that I’ve improved in improvement, so I’ll start there.

I entered education through Teach for America, a program that I have mixed feelings about some days, but when it comes down to it, prepared me very well for the challenges of the classroom.  I still think in terms of TFA’s Teaching as Leadership rubric that forms the basis of their training, one category of which is ”Continuously Improving Effectiveness”.  It was the rubric row I always scored low on, because as a first year teacher in the 5th lowest performing middle school in NC, I was always trying to keep my head above water.  Once I broke the surface, I stayed at about the same level, comfortably adequate.  I think several of the Kenan PD sessions inspired me to improve my effectiveness and do so with quickness.  Justin Osterstrom and Paul Cancellieri’s presentation on data literacy and valid assessments encouraged me to pore over all my summative tests and revise them.  Within two weeks of Vance Kite’s infographics session, I shared with a coworker what I learned and he implemented it in a project with his own students.  I shared what I learned about augmented reality apps with a charter school teacher I met at FLANC (the Foreign Language Association of NC) conference and we talked about how even elementary students could use the technology with low-level speaking skills in world language classes.  Admittedly, for the past 3 years or so I’ve been coasting as an educator, and now it’s nice to feel a sense of urgency–to feel that right this second there’s technology being developed that I can use in my classroom within the week to engage my students, that one county over is someone who has an innovative idea about how to assess my students and all I’ve got to do is ask.

I think the other way in which I’ve grown is advocacy.  I always found policy foggy and dull when I started teaching–I didn’t know who was making the laws that affected me, and I sort of didn’t care because I felt so detached and helpless.  I felt like DPI, school boards and legislators were a million miles away and unreachable, so I just kept my head down and did my job.  When Representative David Price, Education Advisor Eric Guckian and J. B. Buxton spoke, (all very different perspectives), I was riveted.  During the surprise fire drill, I had an unexpected opportunity to chat with Rebecca Hite about advocacy in general and advocacy possibilities for world language teachers.  I now feel like I have a voice, and that the people who make the laws that affect me aren’t a million miles away anymore.  I no longer feel like I have to keep my head down and do my job, because I feel like it’s my job to keep my head up and keep speaking for the future of my students, some of whom want to be teachers when they grow up.

I am proud to have had my experiences with the Kenan Fellows program.  It is exciting to invite my DPI mentors into my classroom to see a lesson and have them comment on all the formative assessment they see.  It’s encouraging to challenge my administration’s no electronics policy in lobbying for a possible bring-your-own-device policy that I think will benefit my students.  It’s energizing to feel that what I’ve gained are the mindset and the spark to drive forward again as an educator.

There is a big part of me that fully understands that social media is the way of the future.  There is a small part of me that participates in it–I have a Facebook page that I mostly use for displaying pictures of my dog–but largely I communicate with people that I know in person or by telephone, and by good old letters and Forever stamps if they’re far away.  I don’t tweet or have a Tumblr page or use Vine or Snapchat, but I understand why children would.  After all, I sat up all night on AOL Instant Messenger in middle school talking to friends that I easily could have called or seen in person.  And all of me understands that you should meet kids where they are.

So, I can get behind Voicethread and Edmodo.  I like the idea of children being able to comment on others’ work and collaborate.  Even if you don’t have a classroom you can have a digital gallery walk.  Students spend a lot of time communicating in short spurts for the whole world to see and ”liking” images and statuses of their peers, so it makes a lot of sense to mimic that activity to engage them.  I also love the idea of giving students time and space to answer.  If you pose a question in an online forum as opposed to live in the classroom, your introverts are more likely to answer.  I am an introvert, and you couldn’t have gotten me to speak up in any class in high school without a crowbar, but I made required online contributions in college without much coercion because like lots of quiet kids, I appreciated the time to compose my thoughts and the freedom from an in-person audience.

But I also understand why teachers and administrators have reason to be cautious about social media in the classroom.  Social media in the real world can breed a mess of ills–with all the news about cyber-bullying, it’s hard to ignore.  Even with sites like Voicethread, students have to be given very clear expectations about their interactions and posts, and teachers must monitor constantly.   The good news is that most sites for education allow moderators to delete posts, but it’s impossible to moderate 24/7.

Ultimately, I think that given appropriate norms and modeling, students will interact positively, but there is always the possibility that students will say something off-topic, inappropriate, or hurtful.