The Leadership and Collaboration standard requires teachers to seek appropriate leadership roles and to collaborate with learners, families, colleagues, and the community to advance the profession and ensure learner growth. This standard is important because, no matter how cliché it sounds, it truly takes a village to raise a child…and an even bigger village to raise a class of students or a whole school! In order to fully ensure learner success, a teacher must collaborate with everyone involved with each individual student’s growth and education.
The standard is demonstrated in my volunteer experience with Turn the Page’s bimonthly Saturday morning Books & Breakfast program at Hurt Park Elementary. As a volunteer, I help set up, hand out books to families who came in for breakfast, and read with children as they ate their breakfast. Collaborating with families, my peers, the employees at Hurt Park, and the volunteers from Turn the Page was an amazing experience that gave me the chance to witness and be a part of the Roanoke community working together for the welfare of families and children.
I had another chance to participate in this kind of all-hands-on-deck community collaboration during the COVID-19 school closures. In addition to student teaching remotely, I had the chance to work with my fellow Glen Cove teachers and bus drivers to deliver meals to Glen Cove students at their homes. Each day, I got to ride a bus to a different neighborhood to deliver meals to students, many of whom were in my class. It was an amazing and fulfilling experience that helped familiarize me with the Glen Cove community beyond the classroom and gave me the opportunity to collaborate with my colleagues to provide support and resources to our students. (Plus, I got to see my students! I missed them so much!)
Another amazing opportunity I experienced during the COVID-19 closures was the Glen Cove Elementary teacher parade through the communities surrounding the school. As a staff, we decorated our cars and drove around to as many neighborhoods as we could manage to squeeze into an afternoon. We blasted some music, waved, and shouted words of love and support to all the wonderful students we so dearly missed, many of whom were holding signs reciprocating that love and support. It was an amazing demonstration of a school and community lifting each other up during times of fear and uncertainty. It was a life-giving afternoon during the first few exhausting weeks of school closure, and it will absolutely be one of the greatest experiences of my career.