I believe a great teacher never stands alone. Each teacher’s ever-expanding network of support and resources truly brings the best out of their teaching and out of their students. Here are several tools I found most useful so far.

I found these tools to be the most useful to impact students and their learning. One specific example that comes to mind starts with a shy 6th grader who was very hesitant to talk and much less write about her experiences. Although she showed interested in being apart of the newspaper club, she didn’t have her voice to communicate what she was interested in. I thought to myself that she doesn’t know how to communicate YET. I was confident that I could work with this. I challenged her to be in charge of the staff shout of the newspaper, which would require her to learn how to use the online tools, coordinate schedules, and learn how to conduct an interview. We started slowly by teaching her the etiquette in asking for an interview and scheduling it. From there we meet daily and worked on her interview questions and etiquette. She took every challenge in stride and promptly interviewed her person of interest and resourced her responses. We hit a wall when it came to writing up and presenting the responses. As we talked to why she was having trouble with this step, I found that she is insecure about her level of writing. I assured her that she is not alone and that with some help she will go further than she could ever imagine. Daily she continued to meet with me during newspaper club sessions. Slowly she learned how to use Canva, Grammarly, and Smore well enough to convey her interview. I was so proud to see her confidence grow and contributing to this newspaper club without the fear of being a grade level behind in her writing. She continues to do staff shout outs by herself and with each new article she improves in her writing skills.