CONTEXT

My name is Jordan Krause (she/her). I have recently wrapped up my fifth year teaching, and my third year in kindergarten. During my professional experience, I have taught at a variety of schools. I spent my first year teaching English to ESL students at Bo Cun Primary School in Kinmen County, Taiwan on a Fulbright teaching grant. During my time in Taiwan, I served students in first through sixth grade in an official teaching capacity as well as pre-kindergarten through adult-aged students as a volunteer(such as during an English story time program at a local library). Upon returning to the US, I spent a year co-teaching fifth grade as a long-term substitute. I have been teaching kindergarten ever since.

My school is a K-5 Elementary school in a suburban setting. We serve approximately 450 students (although that number was closer to 390 this year due to COVID and virtual options available to families). Our district serves 9105 students (Artifact 19, Learn). Our school includes an extended resource program and we have a school-wide focus on STEAM learning. District-wide, our student body is 84.5% White, 6.7% Native American, 4.1% Hispanic/Latino, 2.3% Black, 2.2% Asian/Pacific Islander, and .2% Native Hawaiian. 19% of our students qualify for free or reduced lunch, including an average of 500 students who are identified as homeless by the McKinney-Vento parameters. 17.6% of our students have an IEP or 504.

I am a member of MFPE, local 7638 (Missoula Education Association). I grew up with the union as my mother, a 22-year veteran of the Missoula schools, has long been a building representative and is very active in union work. She encouraged my brother and me to be active in union work long before we both became educators ourselves. After graduating college, I took an internship with the National Education Association in Washington, DC. Most of my work focused in education policy, including work in ESSA analysis and implementation, data gathering and analysis of presidential candidates (especially their education policy stances), and legislative support. Since then, I have stayed abreast of local and national union issues, participated in annual state-wide meetings, and attended most local union meetings even though I was not a building representative myself. I am excited to serve as a building representative for Chief Charlo Elementary in the fall.

The TLI is an exciting opportunity and I am grateful for the chance to participate this year. Through the TLI, I hope to grow personally, professionally, and in my political engagement and advocacy. Teachers continually work to improve the world around them through love and growth of the children and families they serve. The TLI provides an opportunity and a platform to build upon this work at a larger scale.

How does awareness of your own biases, experiences of privilege, and personal values inform your chosen Capstone Project? I grew up in a white, middle class household where our basic needs were always met. Additionally, I had the opportunity to attend pre-k at a time when private options were essentially the only options. I remember our financial resources limited the options available to us, but my family valued and saved for pre-kindergarten because they felt it was an important social, emotional, and academic support going into elementary school. I now recognize how privileged I was to be able to attend pre-k. As a kindergarten educator, I see first-hand how many families struggle to find affordable pre-k education options, if they send their child to pre-k at all. Many of the families I've worked with assumed that all pre-k options in Montana were private and that they wouldn't be able to afford them, or they were discouraged by waitlists for programs like Head Start, so they decided to forgo pre-k for their child altogether. This lack of access to affordable, quality public pre-kindergarten greatly impacts the school readiness of many students entering kindergarten. I was moved to pursue this project and take on advocating for more equitable access to quality pre-k for many reason, but the documentary No Small Matter mirrored what I was seeing in the classroom and helped me to recognize the urgency of our action.
Describe your work with diverse stakeholders, shared learning experiences, and how you anticipate your leadership pathway mindset might evolve during the TLI process. I have been lucky to connect with diverse stakeholders during my TLI process. I have discussed past, current, and possible legislation with Sarah Piper and Amanda Curtis of MFPE, I have reached out to and received some feedback from Montana OPI, I have participated in collaborative/working groups in the ECE community through United Way of Missoula, I have participated in research through United Way's Zero to Five Kindergarten Entry Assessment project, I have created and employed an additional survey to stakeholders such as school personnel and mental health professionals to further understand in what ways our community values pre-k education, and I had a meeting with my own district Superintendent to better understand our current public pre-k model (Jefferson Early Learning Center), what he sees as barriers to expanding access, and his goals for our district's pre-k model.
Describe how your awareness of those from different cultures, experiences, and backgrounds inform your chosen project. Missoula is a racially homogenous place (although that is starting to shift). Most of the diversity I've experienced growing up and as professional in the field of education revolves around socio-economic diversity. In my time at MCPS, I've worked at the school with the highest number of students living in poverty and/or experiencing homelessness, and I've also worked at schools where a majority of my students had their basic needs met. This significant discrepancy in unmet needs directly affects our community, and our historical response to these needs has hardly been equitable. Getting to know and growing to love families who are struggling to make ends meet strengthened my resolve to speak up for and work for equitable community supports and education in my professional and personal lives.

At the beginning of the TLI program, at which level (Emerging, Developing, Performing, or Transforming) in the progressions did you place yourself for each of your four chosen competencies? Provide a rationale for each claim.

Overarching Competency #1: Continuing Learning and Education, Emerging
Before I began discussing pre-kindergarten with other stakeholders, I thought I was in the Developing stage of this competency. Since then, I've realized that I am Emerging rather than Developing. This is because my minimal understanding of pre-k funding impacted the direction and timeline of my professional learning. With that said, I can identify and locate materials to further professional learning goals (such as requesting meetings with professionals in their fields). I often seek out professional publications (such as ASCD briefs, KQED’s Mindshift, and NAEYC, to name a few). I am aware of relevant issues in instruction, policy, association, and learning (through my work as an intern at NEA in EPP, including learning about community schools, IDEA, ESSA analysis and implementation, etc.). All of these fall under the Emerging category of this competency.
Overarching Competency #2: Reflective Process, Emerging.
I place myself at Emerging for Reflective Process. This is because I engaged in targeted professional learning with other educators on this topic (including attending a screening and discussion of No Small Matter and have participated in ECE working groups). I've identified myself as capable of leadership and being a teacher leader through my conversations and discussions with colleagues. Through the Kindergarten Entry Assessment with Zero to Five, I have worked to improve my practice and grow professionally through data analysis. Finally, I strived to serve as a teacher leader in and outside the classroom and school, including advocating for creating home reading routines by sharing literacy research with parents, or advocating for increased access to devices when our school had extra COVID-related funding.
Foundational Competency: Explore and Challenge Inequity, Developing.
Initially, I was able to identify culturally dominant practices and how they create inequity among certain groups (such as using gender-specific phrases to get students’ attention, or having kindergarten roundup in the spring at a school where a significant portion of families register their students right before school starts). I was and am aware of and can identify which culture(s) are dominant and privileged in certain environments. An example of this is when I pursued input from families who were unable to attend school board meetings due to work schedules or working multiple jobs. I recognize the importance of identifying voices that may not often be heard and taking the time to listen to those voices. I make a practice of engaging in ongoing self-education and self-reflection regarding equity and cultural differences. I have so much left to learn, but I am proud of the work I’ve done so far to understand my biases and grow to be a better listener to groups whose experiences and voices have been oppressed historically.
Specific Leadership Pathway Competency selection: Policy Pathway, Advocacy, Emerging.
I placed myself at Emerging because I had conducted research on policies that impact the school environment (such as learning how access to pre-k is inequitable in Montana and how that inequity of access impacts kindergarten readiness). I could also identify and explain the positive and negative impacts of education policies (as evidenced during the Zero to Five KEA data dives and when I helped to research ESSA for analysis and implementation for NEA). The final reason I placed myself at Emerging was because I felt I understood and could identify ways policy can benefit the field of education and the communities we serve, which is why I built upon our work analyzing the KEA data to create a stakeholders values survey by which I hoped to better understand public perception of pre-k services.