Courtney Wolcott

My core values revolve around constantly working to be a joyful, passionate, connected, evolving teacher. Every day I work to better myself and believe in making all types of students feel accepted, honored and welcome to share their identities. I also believe in being able to share my unique personality and identity as a teacher. I believe in honoring this profession and always pursuing professional learning opportunities to better myself. I believe collaboration with fellow teachers is just as beneficial as any workshop we can pay for and attend, so I commit myself to reaching out, asking questions, sharing ideas and helping to build a collaborative community in our school. I also believe education should always be changing and evolving to fit our kids and changing world. If I want to be a teacher with meaningful impact, I need to commit to changing my strategies and trying things outside of my comfort zone. Above all, I believe good teaching is modeling what it is to be an engaged, kind, and genuine citizen. I want to make sure I am always modeling this in my life, so that my kids know what it means to be a change agent in their own lives.

My mission in my career is to emanate a joy for learning and reading that my students soak up and take with them for the rest of their lives. If my students leave the classroom loving to read, I truly feel like I have taught them something that will forever change them. I want this to be the way students leave every classroom, so my mission during TLI is to learn how to build a community of teachers who want to collaborate and build this culture in our school. I need to learn, acquire, build on and reflect upon my leadership skills as a teacher and I need TLI to help me with this journey.

My vision for the year, then, is to find my strength as a leader. I love the idea of being a teacher-leader rather than a leader outside of the classroom. In a profession where best-practices change every day, it seems crucial to be at the forefront of the instruction. I want to find ways to lead through example, lead through collaboration, lead through action and lead by building strong relationships with my colleagues. I began this journey wanting to completely revamp the reading curriculum at my school, and what I realized was this was bulldozing the hard work of many teachers before me. Instead, I need to find a way to meet and share with teachers what we all are doing and learn from one another. I envision creating a group where we can collaborate purposefully consistently and being change agents for the curriculum and instruction in our district.

Context - Part I: My Educational Context

I have just finished my 9th year teaching at the Monforton Elementary School. For the past four years that I have been at Monforton, I taught 4th grade and before that I taught a mixture of middle school ages and subjects. Monforton is part of the rural districts that surround Bozeman, but no longer is the “small school” that is once was when it started out. Two years ago, we opened up an entire new middle school and are busting at the seems to fit all the growing numbers of families moving outside of Bozeman. Below outline some of the academic and demographic statistics reported by OPI this past year.

In the summer after my first year at Monforton, I was given the opportunity to attend a week -long professional development at Teacher's College in New York City to learn about using the workshop model in my reading instruction. Since then, I have found great passion in teaching reading and have been able to departmentalize with my 4th grade colleagues so that I teach reading to all of our 4th graders. It is my deep interest in teaching reading that brought me to find TLI.

I have finished my masters and contemplated going for my National Board Certification, but I felt I wanted a step in between and was looking for a scaffolded leadership experience. I am passionate about instructing reading and helping to generate conversation about the used curriculum at our school, so I wanted to find a group that would help me learn how to move this interest from an informal conversation towards something that resulted in action and change. I wanted the tools to be a change agent in my school, but didn’t know where to start. I have made a few informal presentations in front of my peers regarding using workshop model in my classroom. I helped to organize an outside coach to come in and lead a PD day geared towards writer’s workshop. I have also had many information conversations with teachers who came to observe me use the model and talk about strategies, however, this all felt very informal and didn’t feel to me like it was gathering any speed or generating tangible change. My need for help in knowing how to lead and get the next phase of my idea going is where TLI came in.

When I was grappling with how to channel my interest into a capstone, I had think a great deal about my own biases and personal values because the project so closely aligned with my own values and mission as an educator. I had to be acutely aware of how I was going to present my ideas and be keenly aware and respectful of others ideas and values. I feel very passionate about teaching using this particular model and so I had to think purposefully about what my goal was and make sure that I wasn’t projecting my own values and biases, but rather opening a conversation and opportunity for all of us to learn from one another.

I felt the four competencies that I focused my work with TLI on seemed to blend and work well together in my journey to lead a group of passionate educators. They are outlined below:

My first overarching competency is Interpersonal Effectiveness. At the start of TLI, I felt I was at the pre-emerging or emerging phase. Even before my TLI journey began, I had demonstrated a personal vision for my profession in terms of instruction. I knew that I was passionate about teaching reading, I had pursued professional opportunities in this area and I wanted to share this information in some way with my colleagues. I was not, however, equipped with the skills to support my colleagues in sharing this information. I did not know techniques for working effectively with my colleagues , though I had developed some strong relationships based on mutual trust and shared vision with my 4th grade colleagues, I was ready to expand that circle of trust.

My second overarching competency is Communication. When originally evaluating myself, I felt surprised and upset that on what seemed to be one of my strengths as a teacher, I was most certainly at the pre-emerging level. While I was maybe “acknowledging the challenges of successful teaching and learning” I wasn’t sharing these messages with my colleagues in a meaningful or productive way yet. This seemed like a very logical competency to focus my energy on, because even with not having a crystal clear idea of what I wanted to do for my capstone, I knew that it was going to deal heavily with being able to communicate my ideas and beliefs without letting them overpower or overshadow the incredible ideas of my colleagues. I needed to hone in on how to communicate in a meaningful and productive way.

My diversity-equity-cultural competence selection is Collaborating Purposefully. I feel that I was again at the emerging or pre-emerging phase. I felt by simply being part of TLI that I was engaging in ongoing self-education and self-reflection, but expanding this outside of my own sphere was where I was lacking. I felt this competency was a logical selection for my capstone project as I was hoping to gather teachers together to discuss and collaborate over best practices for teaching reading. I knew that there were going to be lots of varying opinions and the process was going to involve working with a diverse group of teachers and set of beliefs about teaching reading. I knew I was going to need to navigate the complexities of this cultural group and I needed the wherewithal to do it.

Within the Instructional Competency, I am focusing on facilitating collaborative relationships. Again, the common idea of building on my skills to be able to communicate and collaborate with those around me led me to choose this competency. I was certainly showing elements of the emerging phase as I was “showing willingness to work as part of a group to address and implement resolutions to needs and/or challenges” at my school and through my work with TLI. I had reached out to my administrative team to ask for support in attending a week long professional development opportunity to learn about using the workshop model in my classroom. I asked to present and share information at the start of the following year and I was sharing resources informally with colleagues who were interested as well as through some random emails that I felt some would be interested in. I didn’t, however, take my next step of forming a group to continue to foster and build on these relationships. I wasn’t working with my colleagues yet to build relationships based on collaboration, I was too much in my own world.