The Extraordinary Educators Podcast

Celebrate to Educate with Kat Perry

• Danielle Sullivan & Sari Laberis • Season 5 • Episode 40

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Ready to roll out the red carpet for your students? Join us as we delve into an extraordinary and inspiring conversation with Kat Perry, a remarkable reading specialist from Northeast ISD in San Antonio, Texas. Kat's unique approach to celebrating student growth and learning brings the glitz and glamour of Hollywood to the classroom in a district-wide event - The Growth Gala. This isn't your ordinary school event, it's a red carpet affair that celebrates the progress of students and teachers, particularly focusing on vulnerable readers. Listen in to learn about the planning, execution, and the stunning impact of this initiative on the student community.

Read Kat's blog: CurriculumAssociates.com/blog/celebrating-teachers
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Have feedback, questions, or want to be a guest? Email ExtraordinaryEducators@cainc.com to connect with us!

Sari Laberis:

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

Danielle Sullivan:

This is Danielle, and welcome to the Extraordinary Educator Podcast.

Sari Laberis:

Hey everyone, it's Sari, and this week we are joined by Kat Perry, who is the reading specialist in Northeast ISD in San Antonio, Texas.

Danielle Sullivan:

And listeners. Ms. Kat Perry created this really amazing gala as she talked to us about celebrating student growth.

Sari Laberis:

From how she planned the event, from the get-go to how she got buy-in. We hope you find these tips and strategies helpful, and she also wrote a blog about best practices when creating a school or district-wide event that we will link in the show notes. So enjoy. And here is our conversation with Kat.

Danielle Sullivan:

Hi Kat. Welcome to the Extraordinary Educators Podcast. We're so excited to have you.

Sari Laberis:

Thank you so much for having me, of course. So let's jump right in. Talk to us about this incredible district-wide event that you planned to celebrate growth and learning this spring.

Kat Perry:

Absolutely. So, I am the specialist for all of our reading acceleration classes across our district. We're a pretty large district. I support 14 campuses, which encompasses around 30 teachers in total, and so we have this standard class that's offered at all of our campuses called Reading Acceleration. It's for students that need that little extra help getting to grade level. So at the end of the year we put on what's called the growth gala. This was our second annual growth gala. This was my first year in the position, so I didn't have too much context about what the event should be. We're still like a very new program. It's a very new position still, and we really wanted to celebrate our second year of success with this program. The first year was a lot about learning the program, about establishing what this class is going to look like, and so this year we really wanted to celebrate the huge gains and successes we had with kiddos in their reading acceleration.

Danielle Sullivan:

So that's very, very exciting and I love that you are calling it the growth gala. So describe the event and how you started to think about planning. So last year.

Kat Perry:

the person in my position themed the event around red carpet like Oscar acceptance speeches, wanted it to be a fun like end of year celebration. I was given the option if I wanted to continue with that theme or, you know, do a different theme. I love the idea of this growth gala, of having that word gala in there kind of gave it this really elevated feeling. It really added to the importance of the event and I think it centered growth around what we were celebrating, because these are our most vulnerable readers. We're not going to see the quote unquote achievement right that you would see in other readers. What we value the most is growing them as much as possible. So this was about bringing the teachers together to get them to share their best practices, to get them to share what they were excited about, to center in on individual students' stories that they could share and looking at our data overall as a district, as well as highlighting really successful data points for individual teachers, campuses, classrooms and kiddos.

Sari Laberis:

That sounds incredible. I want to attend next year. Talk to us about, like where do you begin? If I'm a leader, or a teacher leader at my school or, you know, in a district and I want to have something like this how do you? How do you start? Where do you start planning? How do you get buy in from stakeholders? Where did you cut what was square one for you?

Kat Perry:

Square one for me in planning any event like this. My background is being a campus leader, so I have been an instructional coach. I've planned smaller versions of this around a department and what's the same whether you're planning for a classroom, for a department or, in my case, for teachers across the entire district is thinking about what is it exactly that we're trying to celebrate or that we're trying to highlight here? When you want to have a really successful program, whether again, that's in your classroom, department or district it's really about that buy in from those stakeholders. So, using this as an opportunity to rejuvenate, revitalize, get those teachers to commit again to this practice that they're building. Right, it's not just us as the district leaders, they're the ones on the boots on the ground. They're in the classroom. It means they need that ownership of it.

Kat Perry:

So I think when you're thinking about planning something really being intentional and what you're trying to highlight. So for us that was all about growth, because we know when we're dealing with our most vulnerable readers, especially in a middle school setting, it can sometimes be frustrating. You're not seeing those huge achievement gains or those huge leaps that you see in an elementary setting. Right, we're not going from yesterday. You couldn't write your name and now you can, which is huge and super exciting. And pre-K we're going from. You know you wouldn't even read out loud at the beginning of the year to now you're willing to read aloud even if you are stumbling those kinds of things.

Danielle Sullivan:

Yeah, that's really important. As a former middle school educator, special education teacher myself, I totally get that. So I want to know what happens at the event. So tell us, you know, give us a sneak peek like the like the E news red carpet. If I'm on the sidelines, am I interviewing them? Who's giving speeches? Like give us the whole rundown.

Kat Perry:

That is exactly the vibe we wanted it to be. So when you walk into the room we have this great red carpet that we purchased. That's all along the floor. We wrote out all the teacher's names on stars and put them down the red carpet, like the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the room that we decorated it with, like the red and the gold and the black, with the all the Hollywood bling, all that Oscar bling you could think of. So that's kind of opening. We really want that party vibe.

Kat Perry:

We invited the teachers to dress up as much as they wanted to. We called it fun and fancy on their little invitation that we made for them. So the beginning of the event really honing in on that celebratory party feeling. From there we moved through kind of a program of looking at district-wide celebrations, narrowing that down to the student level. Then we give the teachers time to plan their Oscar speeches is what we call them. So giving them a model of like you're going to get up and you're going to thank, you know, whoever you want to thank for this year, highlight successes. Everybody gets a slide that they get to personalize or decorate however they want and then at the end of the event they give their speeches. We do another big celebration and then my director says that it's not an end of your celebration unless there's cake. So at the end of the event we have cupcakes and send everybody off for the summer.

Sari Laberis:

That sounds so fun and inspiring. I love what you said about kind of front loading it for teachers too, because I feel like sometimes, like if they just showed up and then you told them right at the moment they had to give a speech, that might be stressful, and then it wouldn't have that same feeling. So you know, telling them what's going to happen, allowing them time to prepare the slides, all of that I think, too. The part that really stands out to me is we all know that teachers are the most hardworking but yet underappreciated profession that is out there, right, and so you are treating your teachers as the celebrities and the change makers that they actually are. Right, they deserve a red carpet, they deserve acceptance speeches and awards and cake and to dress up and be celebrated. And so how did it? How is it received in your district? Did they love it as much as we do?

Kat Perry:

They did. I think teachers sometimes don't do a great job of celebrating themselves. I think they are so used to celebrating their students, to uplifting others, that they also, like, don't take the opportunity to celebrate themselves, and so I think they really appreciated that dedicated time. We didn't have as many teachers dressing up in their fun and fancy wear as I would have liked this year, but since we have committed to this growth gala red carpet theme, I am hoping that next year we'll get even more people dressing in their Oscar best.

Danielle Sullivan:

Yeah. So I want to ask about that, byron what are your plans to get more people to address, like the Oscars? How did you even get the buy in for the teachers to agree to be celebrated in the first place? So just talk a little bit tactical practicals. People are listening to this, thinking that they want to recreate this at their districts.

Kat Perry:

So we made a formal invitation using we have Canvas software, so that's what we used. You could definitely also use Google Slides, powerpoint, any kind of creation software. We made a glitzy invitation. It was black with the gold sparkle and then my team, the middle school English specialists, took a picture. We all agreed to dress up, so we took a picture dressed up, sent it with the invitation to hopefully kind of inspire them to dress up also.

Kat Perry:

Then, at the event this year we were able to take pictures, take pictures of people in, like I think I had two people who dressed up really funny, really fancy. So including those photos next year I'm hoping we'll also get a lot of the buy in. The biggest highlight, I think, was having students share their experience. We were able to get video of some students thanking their teachers, sharing what the reading acceleration class meant to them, and that was definitely the highlight of the event. So I'm also hoping that next year teachers will have more buy in because even if they didn't have a student video, everybody in the room was crying seeing those videos and I think that's really powerful too for buy in to remind them, like you do this for the kiddos.

Sari Laberis:

Right, reminding them of their why. Absolutely. Thank you so much, kat. Unfortunately, that is all the time we have for today, but we really appreciate you sharing what happened, the amazing celebration, and how you kind of got there and planned it from the get go. So thank you for all you do. Thank you for organizing your growth gala, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners will do something similar to celebrate all of the success and learning this spring. So thanks again. Get inspired by following us on social media and please tag us in your posts on Twitter, at curriculumassoch, and on Instagram, at myirety. If you have feedback about the podcast, a topic of interest or want to be a guest, email extraordinaryeducators at cainccom. 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:

And remember, be you be true, be extraordinary. The Extraordinary Educators 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 copyright, material and intellectual property of Curriculum Associates.