I have a job that I love.

That’s not true for a lot of people, and it wasn’t true for me for many years. The business cards on my desk say Instructional Coach of Educational Technology, but when students ask, I just say, “I’m a teacher who helps other teachers.”

There are 13 schools in my district, 10,000 students and hundreds of staff… and me. There are likely dozens of classrooms that I’ve never visited in my four years here. Sometimes, it feels like I was hired as a gardener, but I’m making trips back and forth with a tiny watering can.

I need what this guy has.

The list of things I love about my job is too long to post here, and the thing my job is lacking is easy to describe:

Impact.

Last school year, I visited 729 individual classrooms, all of which I logged in a spreadsheet and monitored with a chart to make sure I was visiting the large sites a fair amount.

And there are dozens of teachers who love kids and who are pushing the ceiling on what “Excellent Teacher” means for 2018.

And I only get to see them a few times a quarter.

How do you choose who gets your time?

That question was asked to me at least four times on Friday, when I presented at NCTM Seattle. Other instructional coaches would raise their eyebrows when I said “thirteen schools,” and the underlying question is the hardest one to answer:

How do I serve my teachers fairly?

Sure, I would love to spend all my time hanging out in the classrooms of those dozens of all-stars, fine-tuning their craft, doing research for them, and grooming them to present at conferences (which I do a bit already). But that leaves hundreds of other teachers without access to my time.

Also — and this is the squirmy part — what about the several thousand students whose teachers don’t get the same service? It’s often the all-star teachers who call my department for support the most, and (as a friend told me once), “Why should the other kids suffer just because their teacher doesn’t wanna grow?”

Fair question, though the wording makes my heart ache a bit.

Anyway, I have a plan in place to rectify some of the issues here. More on that later.

 

 

~Matt “None of my teachers are lazy and all of them are all-stars” Vaudrey