Cultivating teacher networks
Group snags grant to bring conference to Texarkana again
Six Texarkana teachers recently received a grant to hold a top professional development conference for the second year, thanks to a $25,000 grant inspired by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This is one of 37 grants Teacher2Teacher coordinated to give nationwide and is the only one given in Texas for this grant cycle.
Jenny Walker and Brooke Ferguson, teachers at Texarkana Independent School District who also serve as co-executive directors for the Elevating and Celebrating Effective Teaching and Teachers conference, said it’s designed to celebrate teachers for all they do.
“We’re just really excited to see teachers be empowered to be professionals,” Walker said. “I think a lot of times, we celebrate doctors, we celebrate the lawyers. Sometimes, we forget that teachers are professionals. So this conference, more than anything else, just wants to sit the teachers down and say ‘ You are so important and the things that you do matter and hang in there.’”
The ECET2 conference, scheduled for Feb. 2-3 at Texas A&M University-Texarkana, will offer breakout sessions for 200 area teachers and include topics such as curriculum literacy and how to develop a school advocacy committee.
The conference will also include a panel of veteran teachers to offer advice for beginning teachers as well as sessions on career and vocational training, Ferguson said.
“We really wanted to push career and vocational because we feel it’s something the whole country is struggling with,” she said. “Sometimes students feel like if they don’t go to college they have no direction. We want to help other schools, especially the smaller schools, build a strong vocational and career program, because we have such good ones here.”
The conference’s theme is “Grow,” which ties in to the effort to reach out to administrators in smaller districts to recommend teachers to attend the conference, which is offered at no cost.
“We don’t have many personal contacts there,” Walker said. “Hooks, DeKalb, Leary, Bloomburg—all of these smaller schools. So we’re really trying to call out to them…when you have this whole community coming in, you have a lot of information that gets shared a lot of good professional development and strategies and ideas.”
Ferguson added that conferences like this can be vitally important to teachers in smaller districts, as they often work solo in very important roles on their campuses.
“In some of these more rural districts, they might be the entire English department alone,” she said. “It’s hard to get new ideas when you’re by yourself, especially if your school doesn’t have the money to send you to really great professional development. So that idea of collaborating will help bring these communities together.”
Once the rural teachers attend the conference, they will then have the opportunity to create colleague circles where they can share ideas and new strategies.
“The idea is to try to get some of these smaller school teachers in a colleague circle together so they can create their own satellite network to keep this whole idea going, to keep each other sharpened and encouraged,” Ferguson said.
Last year, the conference was held at the Texarkana Convention Center. Walker and Ferguson said they were excited to move it to A&M-Texarkana because of the logistics involved, including classroom space, computer availability and in-house catering services.
“In the grant they really encourage us to build a community around ECET,” Ferguson said. “Their whole purpose is to help us build a presence in a community and we knew that Texas A&M was the partner we needed for that. They’ve been supportive and excited about being a partner. Plus, for people who don’t know what ECET is, it lends some credibility. We’re still trying to get that known.”
The first wave of conference invitations went out last week, and those teachers who were chosen have the opportunity to nominate someone else. Teachers can also be nominated at the group’s website, www.ecet2txk.com.
“We’re just trying to grow this teacher network,” Ferguson said, adding that only 20 percent of teachers who attended last year’s conference will be able to come back this year. “Eighty percent of the people who we’re bringing in were not people who were here last year because we want to spread the love and we want to build that network and keep bringing in new people. It builds a stronger community of teachers. It also spreads the celebration of teachers.”
Information on ECET2 can be found on its website, on Facebook and Twitter or by calling 903-280-3270. Information on the national ECET2 network can be found at teacher2teacher.education.