A friend of mine recently told me: “You should totally blog about this new multi-classroom leader thing that you do”. Here I am tonight in front of a blank piece of blog post. Where to start?
My name is Romain, I have been teaching for almost 15 years, both in France and in the US. A few years ago, I decided to “leave” my classroom to try to see if I could have a positive impact on more students and teachers through instructional coaching. I was lucky to find a great school and a fantastic principal willing to let me try new ways to go about this.
Last year, project LIFT and public impact gave our school an opportunity to re-think the way we work as teams to maximize the impact of our best teachers. These positions should help us achieve 3 goals, pretty simple on paper:
- Improve the quality and consistency of the instruction delivered across the school: In other words, all our students should benefit from this!
- Provide new career paths for our best teachers with gradual increase of their responsibilities and their salaries: In other words, our irreplaceable teachers should not feel like they have to leave the classroom to grow!
- Provide more hands on, in the classroom instructional support and coaching: All our teachers, especially the most inexperienced ones, should benefit from this!
The key lever to these 3 goals is the strategic use of our technology through blended learning models that free time and create new avenues for us to expand our impact on more students
This seems pretty simple and logical on paper. This blog will be dedicated to journaling the reality of this exciting (and scary at times) adventure. Today, I hold one of these positions I helped to design. I am the 6th and 7th grade Multi-Classroom Leader at Ranson IB middle school. I work with an amazing team including 2 blended learning teachers, 6 classroom teachers and 2 learning coaches. You will get to know each of them through this blog. Together, through trial and error and constant risk taking, we are imagining new ways to work together and to leverage the use of our technology in the process. Is it always easy? Absolutely not, and some days, it feels like we are walking so close to the edge that we may fall. Is it always interesting? We do think so but we also want you to be the judges of that.
So buckle up and join us on this journey!
Romain
Multi Classroom Leader
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail”
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