Written by Jeanne Russell
At CAST Schools, we believe in nurturing our homegrown talent. Of course, this starts with a belief in our students, and their gifts and talents. But we also recognize that the adults in our organization – starting with our teachers – are the heart of what we do, and we believe in listening to the voices of practitioners as we work to make education more relevant, more personalized, and more connected.
For the first time this year, we were able, thanks to a grant from City Education Partners, to support a group of assistant principals from our network who hope to become principals some day. It’s an overdue project, as many of our current principals started as assistant principals at our schools. This cohort of 6 assistant principals spent the year developing new systems at their school – systems for leading professional learning, for coaching, or for signaling on student improvement. Listening to them present at our annual SparkED, to an audience of their peers, teachers, CAST staff and all of our CAST Principals, I was reminded of the power of engaging the people closest to the work in designing solutions, and I was blown away by their ideas, and the pride they took in their work.
At SparkED, hosted by the DoSeum, we also heard from our educator advisory board, representing each of our 7 schools. Those teachers also brought forward powerful ideas about how to make professional learning more engaging and impactful, how to better organize school-based teams, how to build stronger systems for educator feedback, and to provide opportunities for teachers to collaborate outside the school building and day.
So much of what happens in public education, sadly, is top-down, but at CAST we are working hard to ensure the voices of the people inside schools – our students, our teachers, our leaders – are heard. We know that those who are closest to the work have the very best ideas, and we want to hear them and act upon them.