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Canfield school administrators return to the classroom
By Billy Ludt
CANFIELD
The road to a career in school administration often begins in the classroom, but how often do administrators return to teaching?
For Canfield schools, administrators had often been many years removed from the classroom. So, they picked up current teachers’ lesson plans or drew up their own to have a crack at teaching Tuesday.
Superintendent Alex Geordan took over Shelley Tancer’s second-grade class at Hilltop Elementary.
Geordan, whose career in education began in 1994 with student-teaching in second-grade in Warren City Schools, was focused on teaching a lesson in math that incorporated elements of other topics. The school system teaches Bridges, a math curriculum geared for preparing students for Common Core standardized testing.
“I hear a lot that it’s a difficult and rigorous program to initiate,” Geordan said.
Every time he gets tired of working in his office, Geordan said he goes out into the halls and interacts with students.
“It’s about talking to teachers, understanding and appreciating what we started this profession for,” Geordan said. “Engaging with kids again, I’m starting to appreciate more what our teachers are doing every day.”
This is the first time Canfield schools organized a collective return to a classroom in every school for its administrators.
“I think it’s good; I think it’s a different perspective,” classroom aide Terrie Konik said. “It’s a different person offering different information.”
Teachers were told not to assist the principals, the program directors and superintendents while they took over the classroom.
“It’s very nice to have them being able to come back to see and do what we’re doing in the classroom,” Tancer said. “It’s cool to see [Geordan’s] willing to see what it’s like to teach again.”
Tancer said she’d like to see this happen once or twice every school year.
Middle-school principal Judd Rubin took over for Julie Webb’s fifth-grade language arts class.
Rubin, who has worked for nine years as a school administrator, said he was nervous leading up to Tuesday.
Rubin taught a first-person narrative on a letter that was written after the attack on Pearl Harbor. From there, the students focused on figurative language used in the letter and tried to infer from dialect where the narrator lived.
For the two 80-minute periods he taught, Rubin had to do two hours’ worth of preparations.
“It would have been really easy for Julie to give me something easy to do, but we went really in-depth with the lesson we were working on, and I’m glad we did it that way,” Rubin said.
Rubin was a fourth-grade teacher in the Liberty School District for six years and said that’s why he decided on a fifth-grade class.
“I always have a tremendous respect for teachers. It’s definitely good to be back and get in the classroom,” he said. “Being there, I’m pretty spent right now for the two pods I taught. Overall, it was a great experience – just understanding how hard they work and the time they put in to make sure their lesson plans work.”