By Kelly Keene

“You’re ambitious, aren’t you?” He looked down at me, and for a moment, I started to doubt my plan.

I had just finished outlining how I would take what I had learned from a year-long teaching fellowship and apply it to my classroom. The fellowship was awesome. Every session we had brought in new, practical and relevant ways to make the teaching of reading and writing more accessible to secondary students. I was in my element, and I soaked it all up. When they asked us to put together a plan for implementing 10% of the new ideas into our own classes, I ignored the 10% guideline. 

Why only 10%? Mr. Plaid Shirt said, “it was to set an attainable goal.” But he was talking to a group of high achieving professionals, who had been carrying the learning gap on their shoulders for years, and finally had some exciting new ways to close it. Standardized testing, and unreasonable college admittance standards put pressure on kids like never before. The job market changed faster than social media standards for communicating. Teachers were tasked with preparing students for jobs that didn’t even exist yet, and literacy levels were at an all time low. We were hungry. Our students were starving. So in the dreaming phase of forming our plans, there was no way to stop at 10%.

When they paired us with thinking partners, I, unfortunately, got stuck with him: Mr. Plaid Shirt. He had been the one fly in the proverbial ointment that was this seminar. In conference room D, surrounded by brilliant, mostly female teachers, he was the presenter that raised his voice unnecessarily, and scoffed at the premise of almost every question. 

Once everybody around me had broken off into pairs, and a humming buzz filled the air,  I turned to Mr. Plaid Shirt and shared my plan. It started with a new, curated classroom library that would fuel a more relevant and meaningful independent reading program. Students would choose everything they read for themselves, and all the books would be glossy, fresh, clean and diverse. Peer-to-peer book talks would make reading social, and motivate kids to push themselves beyond traditional lexile comfort zones. 

But I didn’t stop there. Multigenre writing projects would replace stiff research papers, and help students write in many different styles. We would include practical pieces that would encourage students to write beyond the world of academia. Then, there were the writing workshops, in which the students shared their work and honored the act of writing. Embracing the messiness, students would determine what they needed by way of feedback and revision. I had a whole unit on reading sample revision pieces and using cognitive strategies to interact with model texts. 

I’m sure my cheeks flushed as I spoke, and I could sense that I needed to slow down and spend more time on the details, but I was too excited. 

“You’re ambitious, aren’t you?” he said when I finished. My cheeks grew hot. I had never heard the word “ambitious” used in such a negative way before, but he wielded it like an ax, threatening my proposal and enthusiasm. 

Mr. Plaid Shirt’s caution wasn’t entirely his own fault. He had been doing this a long time. His work in and out of the classroom had taught him that smaller increments were the way to go. We were two different educators, but we both wanted a better learning experience for students. We needed to see measurable success. We needed a win. The only problem was that we had different visions for how to make that happen. He was a stream, slowly carving change through bedrock, one grain of sand at a time. I wanted to be a rocket, blasting through mountains in moments. 

After his comment, I looked him in the eye and said, “Yes I am.”

When I pieced the remains of my plan together on my own time, I didn’t let Mr. Plaid Shirt’s skepticism stop me. I couldn’t. I would not give students only 10% of the good stuff, when they could have so much more.

There were times when I hit barriers. When I was eager to switch up the curriculum, some of my department didn’t want to change their lesson plans. When I went to buy new books, our budget didn’t have enough funding. When my classes looked different from other models, parents questioned my approach. But I was ambitious. I was a rocket. I piloted new programs to prove they could be done. I applied for grant funding and got the materials we needed. I measured student success and made the growth visible to families. And when the glaring sun blinded my path forward, I remembered my ambition, and continued to fly.