I had the wonderful opportunity, thanks to the S2TLC grant, to attend the NCTM National Conference in Boston this past April. It was my first experience speaking at a conference, and while I initially had a hard time understanding my role in the process and why someone would want to come listen to us, I am very glad that I did it and felt that it went well. The crowd was comprised mostly of administrators and college professors that were implementing co-op programs at their own school and wanted to know the successes and struggles that we had as a group, and were looking for insight on how to better support the new teachers coming in.
My biggest piece of advice for them was to have a mentor program in place with continued communication after their service year. I continued to speak about my experience with Lorie, and how her forcing me into the teaching role from day one, with constant reflection, really helped shape who I am as a teacher today, and that without that I probably would have left my current school after one year. I learned so much from her that year, and while the work was burdensome at times, without it, I would not have been even close to prepared for what I dealt with at my current school for the first two years.
After our speaking was done I managed to go to 9 more presentations over the next few days. The highlight being a woman from Toronto who shared her curriculum for developing an in-class economic system, where students had defined jobs, with salaries, and were forced to rent their desks, pay for “life events”, host auctions, pay taxes, and so much more. She said she dedicated roughly 15 minutes each class to keep the system going throughout the year and said that the buy in from the students was always near 100%, and that they thoroughly enjoyed it. I would really like to implement this at my school and was thinking about integrating into a new curriculum that I will be teaching next year.