It's all coming together

I'm beginning to feel things all come together and that's a wonderful feeling!  I've felt so disjointed and broken for so long that it's nice to feel cohesion and connection for a change.  I spent most of this week in Oklahoma City at the SDE sponsored educators conference Vision 2020.  The caliber of speakers and depth of research presented was impressive.  Every session that I attended presented research about reading instruction, school reform and leadership.  I am so excited about the new things that I learned.  I also learned more about my job.

I have a partner and our office will be housed at the Autry Technology Center.  We will be working with twenty-three districts in our assigned region.  There are sixty coaches across the state and we cover all 530 school districts in the state.  They divided the assignments based on the number of classroom teachers in our districts.  Each coach is to have approximately 1,000 teachers.  Our twenty-three districts included close to 1,800 teachers.  We're still unclear as to whether my partner and I will work together to serve all 23 districts or if we'll be dividing those into two smaller groupings.  I haven't closely examined a map yet to know what the distances are between the districts, but I know a good bit of travel will be involved.  My job is to provide professional development and instructional support for my districts to help them make the transition from PASS to Common Core and to assist them in reaching whatever instructional goals they may have set for themselves.  I'll be participating in lots of professional development myself in addition to what I provide.  

There are several people at the state department that have worked a long time to bring this initiative to the state of Oklahoma.  We are one of the first, if not the first, state to do a program like this.  The women that I've heard speak this week about how this initiative came to fruition have been encouraging and inspirational.  They've talked often about how all of the decisions for this program were very prayerfully considered and how they've relied on a higher power when things seemed impossible.  I look forward to continuing to get to know them and this team that they've assembled.  I know that I will be challenged both professionally and personally on this part of my life journey.

I have a lot of reading to do and taking a page from my friend Kelly Wiggains' blog I'll write reviews of the various books that I read.  Most of them will be job related, but I'll try to share other books that I've enjoyed as well.  I'm working on expanding my literary horizons with my book choices, if you have recommendations for me I'd love to have those!  Taking another page from Kelly, I'm going to begin a journal list of books I need to read.  I'll be glad to add your recommendations to my list.

There is still a lot for me to learn and a certainly lots to do before I can fully embrace my new job, but it's all coming together and it's going to be amazing!