The Extraordinary Educators Podcast

Organization with Becki Cope

• Danielle Sullivan & Sari Laberis • Season 5 • Episode 4

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This episode of The Extraordinary Educators Podcast is all about organization and coordination among teammates! Becki Cope, a kindergarten teacher from Mississippi, joins Danielle and Sari to share her expertise. Becki starts by explaining the power of leaning on your team to maximize planning time. She then dives in to how her team maintains organization across the board. Becki also shares how to keep the momentum and team camaraderie going, using data meetings and purposeful planning. Becki wraps up by leaving listeners with some crucial parting advice.

Visit CurriculumAssociates.com/blog/time-saving-tips to read Becki's recent blog about time-saving organizational tips! Follow us on Twitter at @CurriculumAssoc and Instagram at @MyiReady, and email ExtraordinaryEducators@cainc.com to contact us with feedback, questions, or if you want to be a guest!

Sari Laberis:

Curriculum Associates presents the Extraordinary Educators podcast with hosts Danielle Sullivan and Sari Laberis your tips, best practices and successes to improve your teaching and leadership and drive student growth and learning. We're here for you.

Danielle Sullivan:

Hello everyone, welcome to The Extraordinary Educators Podcast.

Sari Laberis:

A nd I'm Sari, and this week we are joined by Extraordinary Educator Becki Cope, who has been teaching for 22 years. She most recently transitioned to kindergarten and she teaches in Mississippi.

Danielle Sullivan:

And her years of expertise - you can tell in the podcast she's really clear, to the point. But it's exciting because she's talking about how you do not have to do anything alone as a teacher. You actually can lean into your teammates, which is very helpful to be reminded of.

Sari Laberis:

Right. Everyone has their areas of strength and expertise. We talked to her about how to just dive into the school year in terms of organizing yourself, your physical space, your materials, your lesson planning, as you're also juggling PD and staff meetings and all of that. So Becki offers some great advice and practical tips and strategies that you can hopefully use this fall. So here's our conversation with Becki.

Danielle Sullivan:

Hello Becki, welcome back to The Extraordinary Educators Podcast. We are so excited to have you on the podcast again. How are things been going?

Becki Cope:

They've been going really well in June, summer, but getting ready for the start of the next school year.

Sari Laberis:

Awesome. Thanks again for being here, Becki. So I know you recently wrote a blog on this that we will link in the show notes, but would love to hear from you during this extremely chaotic time of year, when you're coming back from summer vacation, you're prepping your classroom, you have a million staff meetings and PD, as well as all of the tasks that you have to get done what is a strategy that you use to kind of help manage that?

Becki Cope:

I think one of the most important things that I do to manage that is that I don't try to do everything myself, that I'm okay asking for help. I use my teammates. We're very fortunate that we have assistants, as well, but just to use the people around you to help you out.

Sari Laberis:

Thanks for sharing that. It's obviously so important to lean on your team. Can you talk a little bit about the specifics, do you like, for example, with your grade level team or your department team, do you have a process or system, or do you all talk it out ahead of time? How does that actually play itself out when you're kind of prepping for the school year?

Becki Cope:

So within the next few weeks we'll meet together and just kind of put together a little map or a plan. You know, obviously our district gives us a pacing guide that we have to use, but we kind of have some freedom as far as our own individual.

Becki Cope:

So we'll look at as a group and as a team. The kindergarten teachers will look at that pacing guide and where we need to start, what we need to do, and kindergarten we use themes, so what themes we want to use to incorporate that. But then we'll break apart, kind of I may do the math planning and somebody else may do the reading planning, somebody else may do the phonics planning, somebody may do the science planning and then just kind of bring that all back together so that we're not all doing the exact same thing.

Danielle Sullivan:

That is so important because I feel like sometimes in education we feel like we have to do it all ourselves, and it's a lot, especially when you're thinking about, like you just listed, all the different subjects and how to do that. So do you have certain systems that help you all organize all of that planning, or what are your systems and how do you put the plans back together so that each of you can utilize all those plans?

Becki Cope:

So we use a Google Doc and that way we can share it, we can see where everything is at. We also use that as a kind of like with our little organization system as far as what theme we're teaching and that kind of stuff. But we can see what each other is doing on that Google Doc and try to relate what we're doing to something else too. You know a lot of trying to put together. You know the math and the reading, so you're integrating those. The integrate the different subject areas so that even though one person might be planning it, everybody's integrating it within the classroom.

Sari Laberis:

If there's a listener who's kind of maybe newer to a school this year, or their team currently doesn't do this and they're doing everything more in an isolated way, how do you recommend they dive in and start? Do you just recommend, like, sending your team an email or I'm not sure what? What? What do you think?

Becki Cope:

I think one of the hardest things to do is to know that to ask for help in any part of your life. Physically, mentally, whatever asking for help or knowing that you need help is hard. So you have to be vulnerable to yourself and say, "look, I need help. We need to do this together and don't be afraid to share your ideas. Have people share their ideas. This will be my 22nd year teaching, but I'm gonna be teaching with somebody. It'll be their first year teaching kindergarten, so I know they have bright, fresh ideas that I don't know. But then I've tried stuff for the last, you know, eight years in kindergarten and know, hey, that's not gonna work or this really worked well. So just to really share your strengths and weaknesses and know that I don't know everything and you don't know everything, we have to come together to figure that out.

Danielle Sullivan:

And how do you continue to meet throughout the year, or do you like, you plan in the beginning of the year. But what's your strategy to maintain this camaraderie as things get all crazy all the time in education?

Becki Cope:

Absolutely. So we have professional learning communities that we meet within our grade level once a week, so say Tuesdays, we would meet. Now kindergarten is not divided by subjects. We teach all the subjects, so we meet all together. The other grade levels are third, fourth and fifth grades are departmentalized, so their reading may meet on Tuesdays and their math may meet on Thursdays. So a little different.

Becki Cope:

But within our professional learning communities we get together, we talk about what we're teaching, what the kids have learned, what they didn't learn, you know, especially even those like who, the students that already know it. How can we go further with them? How can we go deeper with them? They students who are struggling, what can we do to help them? So we do that weekly and then we also meet Once a week just to kind of we call it like a planning meeting where we're not really talking about the strategies we're using and we're not really talking about successes and failures, but we're talking about the planning. What are we doing? What book are we reading? What math you know standard are we going to be working on?

Sari Laberis:

Super helpful and and setting aside that time to really dedicate to it I think helps on the front end right, because you know what's coming.

Becki Cope:

You don't have to worry about that, so definitely. We keep a binder box, I guess, with copies of the stuff that we would use. So you know, like I said, I've been teaching kindergarten for eight years, so I have a pretty good collection of you know stuff on the alphabet, and so when we're doing alphabet I'll put all my stuff in that box and then the other teachers could come in and we can kind of see what each other has To use and share from each other. As far as that goes to, love that.

Sari Laberis:

Such a great system, and I'm sure you're the other teachers you work with. Love, the love, the resource. So, before we close out, what is one tip or sort of parting advice that you have for our listeners as they head back for this next school year?

Becki Cope:

I think by one tip would just be like to breathe. Take it easy, everything's gonna be okay. My last school year was not the best and I made it through it, and you know you just take one day at a time and know that you're making a difference in the kids lives.

Danielle Sullivan:

That's actually good life advice, Becki. I mean if we could all just breathe and realize that we're actually the only thing we can controls our reaction to things. We can't even control other people, but just we appreciate you so much. We appreciate you serving Little people for eight years, little bit bigger people for the rest of your 22 years in education, and just thank you so much for everything that you do.

Becki Cope:

Well, thank you, I love to be involved with you all too. You've been great, so thanks so much, becky.

Sari Laberis:

Get inspired by following us on social media and please tag us in your posts on Twitter @CurriculumAssoc, and on Instagram @MyiReady. If you have feedback about the podcast, a topic of interest or want to be a guest, email ExtraordinaryE ducators@cainc. com. Subscribe where you listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to help more educators like you, join the conversation. Please leave a review.

Danielle Sullivan:

Remember, be you be true, be extraordinary. The Extraordinary Educator Podcast is produced by Curriculum Associates. Editing by Whiteboard Geeks, social media by Atziri Hannon, guest booking by Sari Laberis, production by Hayley Browning. This podcast is copyrighted materials and intellectual property of Curriculum Associates.