Tennessee Teacher of the Year addresses Lipscomb alumni
Janel Shoun-Smith |
Vogelsang (right) greeted by Deborah Boyd, Interim Dean of the College of Education.
Teacher-leaders dream big dreams, use words wisely and teach from the heart, Vogelsang says
Sometimes you just have to be that “one lone nut out on a hill,” to make an impact on the education of today’s children, advised the Tennessee State Teacher of the Year Karen Vogelsang at the recent second annual Summer Alumni Summit of the College of Education.
Vogelsang borrowed her theme from Derek Sivers’ TED Talk titled “How to start a movement,” in which he showed an Internet video of one young man dancing on a hill in the middle of a crowd. The “lone nut” is ignored for a little while, but within three minutes, the entire crowd is up and dancing with him.
Vogelsang said she was that “lone nut” at her school in Memphis, when she suggested to her principal that perhaps they create an outdoor classroom, a nature area or garden designed for learning various concepts. That one suggestion took her down the road to become a teacher-leader at her school and in her district, and to eventually be honored with the Teacher of the Year Award in 2015.
Vogelsang was the keynote speaker for the summit, which also featured breakout sessions during the day on topics such as technology, modern fiction works, legal issues in education, strengthening connections with students and supporting students with disabilities.
But the main theme of the day was teacher leadership, with Vogelsang’s keynote speech supplemented with a session on the skills needed for teacher leadership and perspectives from a current teacher in Nashville’s public schools.
“We need to teach from the heart,” Vogelsang told the crowd. “We seem to be teaching a generation of students who are more distant than ever and in desperate need of relationships.”
Teacher-leaders teach from the heart, dare to dream and use words wisely, she said, illustrating each point with an example from her 12 years in the classroom.
After making that suggestion for an outdoor classroom at her school, Vogelsang began researching effective teaching methods in garden classrooms and wasn’t ready to plant until the summer, when all the teachers scatter for their own pursuits. So she ended up with one helper, but as Sivers noted in his TED Talk, it really only takes one follower to start a movement.
So Vogelsang, her helper and their husbands built the entire outdoor classroom over the summer, creating a fraction garden, a Tennessee garden, a measurement garden, a small pond and more.
“After creating the garden, all of a sudden we were leading our faculty in how to use the garden,” Vogelsang said. Then she was elected to attend a conference; then she was elected to a board of the association; then she began developing curriculum for outdoor classrooms; and so her path to teacher-leader went.
In 2012, Vogelsang receive a fellowship from The Martin Institute to attend Harvard’s Project Zero Classroom. In 2014, she presented at Harvard’s Project Zero conference and was asked to co-lead the Project Zero Memphis group. She has also served on Tennessee’s Math Textbook Committee and as a Common Core math coach. She was recently selected as a Hope Street Group Fellow for Tennessee.
The College of Education Summer Alumni Summit is free to all Lipscomb education alumni and includes a free lunch. The summit is a special day to reconnect with former classmates and professors as well as receive professional development in breakout sessions.