This guest post is contributed by Shari Conditt, 2015 ESD 112 Teacher of the year. An NBCT, she is her union’s co-president and facilitates a NBPTS cohort for her district.

Sometimes I feel like I’m balancing on a tightrope, fifty feet in the air holding a yellow notepad in one hand and a hot mocha in the other.  Teacher leadership is a lot like that.
I work in a small, rural school district as a full time teacher.  I see over 120 students a day and teach two different AP courses. I developed my district’s national board cohort, a program I created in my district to facilitate teachers as they seek certification.   I am also the teacher’s union co-president, a position I’ve held for the past eight years. I’ve bargained four contracts, implemented TPEP, and worked extensively to mentor teachers and am now in the midst of trying to help teachers as we have a massive shift in our district due to the construction of a new high school.  Despite all of this work, I’ve remained incredibly positive and determined to provide our teachers with as many supports as possible.
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The following holiday offering is a guest-post from Brian Sites, an NBCT since 2009 who teaches and mentors at-risk students in a blended-learning program in Richland. He also currently serves as a Regional NBCT Ambassador Coordinator for the WEA.

It was time. Storage bins were cleared, the ladder was brought down, and the Christmas lights were dug up from beneath the layers of decorations that had been piled on top of them for the past eleven months. It was a frigid day; but the first snow had yet to fall, and I knew if I waited any longer, it would be a decision I would regret putting off. It was time to hang those darned Christmas lights (bah-humbug)!

As I began to unwind the wound-up balls of icicle lights, it dawned on me. The tangled lights represented a student. We all have those students, the tough ones who challenge our abilities as a teacher on a consistent basis. Within each of these students, there is so much they are dealing with, that it takes time to unravel what is going on beneath the surface.

Just like the unwinding of the Christmas lights, we must be patient with our students. The work can be frustrating at times, and although one approach seems to be working, all of a sudden, things seem to get even more tangled than when you first began. With patience, however, the tangles become less. The lights begin to unravel before our very eyes, and we see the fruits of our labor. Pretty soon, that ball of knots becomes something much greater than it once was.

It was cold, and there were times when I felt like giving up, and just going and getting a new set of lights. But, I persisted, and in the end, received what I set out to accomplish in the first place…creating something beautiful, that brings a smile to my face due to the joy I get knowing I had a part in the end result.

Our students are the same…we work to create something of beauty. We know the potential they have, of becoming that shining light that deserves the attention it has drawn. We are driven to work harder, knowing that we could give up and move on, but we choose not to because there is still work to do. We choose to hang in there, undoing the tricky knots, maneuvering every which way until we find what works.

In the end, we see the amazing beauty that was once hidden becomes visible for all to see, and our work was well worth the time spent.

This piece from NBCT Kareen Borders was originally posted on the Ready Washington Coalition’s blog, and available here. It is reposted with the Coalition and the author’s permission.

Why did the states create the Common Core State Standards?  

We are preparing our students to compete in a world that is different than ours, and education needs to be responsive to this.  The bottom line is that my middle school science students need to be ready for college, career and life.  Right now, 80% of entering college freshmen are not prepared academically for first-year courses, according to ACT, and the United States spends an estimated $3 billion a year on college remediation, according to Complete College America. 

Does this mean that as a teacher, I wasn’t doing a good job or didn’t have high goals before? 

Unequivocally, the answer is no.  Teachers have been doing and continue to do a great job.  I see Common Core as an exciting shift that will finally put standards into place that aren’t full of education-ese; standards that will allow me to be innovative in helping my students to reach these goals. Clear goals, rather than long and vague goals about what students need to know and be able to do are long overdue.  And what I especially like: CCSS get teachers out of the test-prep business in their classrooms and frees up teachers to provide opportunities for richer learning and mastery of increasingly difficult problems and texts. So, I can concentrate on the work of preparing my students for college, career, and life.  Will it be hard work?  Yes. Teachers are ready to take on this hard work.  Major shifts in instruction are already happening in thousands of classrooms.

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