The SWHS instructional coaches recently hosted another round of Teached Admin Edition. During this competition, SWHS admins had to teach in their own style while using objects predetermined in a box given to them ahead of time. The objects for this competition included mini ducks, post-it notes, response cards and dry erase dice. The winner of this activity was science curriculum specialist, Mrs. Arnica Sullivan.
Instructional coach, Mrs. Janet Belval thought it would’ve been a great idea to do this competition, which has been running with teachers for the past two years, with school administration. A panel of judges watched the video of the lessons to determine who presented the best lesson using those materials.
“I can’t speak for what others think, but me personally, it’s not easy to use some of the items,” Sullivan explained. “I also learned that having clear intentions is really helpful when trying to get the point across. I learned that it’s fun to be creative”.
Sullivan also says that she was “surprised and excited” when it was revealed that she was the winner of this year’s Teached Admin Edition.
When asked if the school admin team should continue doing this activity, Sullian stated, “I hope so. I see a great opportunity. I also think the way it’s run where teachers can see what teachers do, is a great way to get ideas because they post it online to where other teachers can see. It was neat to see what others did.“
The purpose of Teached Admin Edition is to bring new ideas to the table on how to teach curriculum. Every teacher has a different style of instruction, and it is valuable to share those ideas across departments.
“It caused me to pause to really think of why I was doing it and what I wanted the outcome to be,” Sullivan said. “[It] also reminded me how hard teacher’s jobs are to do these lessons everyday to keep the engagement and excitement.”
The two other participants were South Windsor High School’s Principal Mr. Joseph LeRoy and K-12 Literacy Curriculum Specialist Mrs. Kathleen Simoneau.
Simoneau stated that she appreciated the opportunity and thanked the ELA department for their participation and support for this activity.
“The Admin Teached edition was a creative and engaging opportunity to deliver a professional learning session by meaningfully incorporating ‘ingredients’ to achieve a desired outcome,” Simoneau said. “Admin Teached encapsulates our district’s ideals of making learning intentional, inviting, and irresistible.”
Teachers aspire for the classrooms to reflect the type of learning environments that they practice through teached. They also hope to be the educational leaders and role models that they model during teached, someone their students can learn from.
“If we want our classrooms to reflect these types of learning environments, then we, as educational leaders, must model this for our teachers,” Simoneau said.
Over the past two years that Teached has been running, numerous teachers have participated, with eight winners named so far. The previous winners of Teached include Ms Eddy (1st Winner), Mr. Snyder, Mrs. Field, Ms. Snyder, Ms. Karasinski, Mr. Gorski and Mrs. Necci.
