Select Central Florida teachers
Teachers tapped to help boost classroom efforts
will take part in a new leadership program that they hope will help students learn better.
When Deborah Carmona was growing up on a farm in Puerto Rico, she taught the other students at school new words and how to pronounce them.
That passion for teaching led her to a career as an Orange County schoolteacher. Now she is one of a select group of educators chosen for a new leadership program they hope will improve their classroom skills and, ultimately, help students learn better.
“If I work with other teachers, I can be more successful with students,” said Carmona, who was teacher of the year at Lancaster Elementary and is a reading coach at Wyndham Lakes Elementary.
The Florida Teacher Leader Fellowship, funded by a $764,553 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, starts Tuesday in Tallahassee with the first of four teacher “leadership institutes.” It also will include an international leadership conference in March 2017 in Miami.
The tentative plan is for the program to continue and for districts eventually to develop their own teacher-leadership academies, said Philip Poekert, assistant director of the University of
Florida’s Lastinger Center for Learning, which co-developed the fellowship.
Forty fellows from 22 counties were selected from 217 applicants. Five are from Central Flor- ida.
Ky Vu, senior program officer with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said one of the fellowship’s goals is to form a network of teachers that will take what they learn back to their schools and districts.
“Top-down leadership will fail,” he said.
The fellowship, which will conclude in August 2017, will keep the participants connected via in-person meetings through a virtual system provided by the North Carolina-based Center for Teaching Quality. Teachers will develop a project that meets a need, Vu said.
“We don’t feel like we’re close enough to the work to dictate anything,” he said. “It’s basically going to be up to the teachers.”
Vu said the goal is to help students meet state standards. But teachers said they want to go further.
“I think it’s easy to lose sight of the whole child when you’re putting the focus on testing,” said Pam Ferrante, who has nearly 30 years of experience and trains other teachers in Seminole County.
Marti Ladd, a social-studies teacher at Lyman High in Seminole County, echoed that theme.
Test preparation may be paramount, but teaching so students become successful in college and life is important too, she said.
“If I’m doing things the right way, they’re prepared for the test,” Ladd said.
Kelly Dodd, a teacher at Grassy Lake Elementary in Lake County, wrote in her application about a third-grader who lived in a motel and didn’t always have enough to eat. That taught her that her job didn’t end at her classroom door.
“She needed to know more than the steps of the scientific method,” Dodd wrote. “She needed to know I cared.”
Dylan Emerick-Brown, an English teacher who started a student literary magazine at Deltona High School in Volusia County, said that he views the fellowship as a chance to experiment with new ideas rather than following dictates from administrators.
“We don’t just see the data or the test scores,” said Emerick- Brown, who received a letter of recommendation from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz. “We see how the students struggle, how they did in the classroom. We can see how the struggle affected the scores, so hopefully we can find solutions.”