Monday through Wednesday 

My direct service work, half of my role as a Fellow, is teaching small-group literacy interventions to students, mostly high schoolers. Mondays are fairly light for me as I don’t teach any small pull-out groups. I have check-ins, other meetings, and professional development, but I spend most of Mondays working on my strategic project or Fellowship initiatives. My strategic project, the other half of what I do in the Fellowship, is documenting and disseminating best practices in education at our school in partnership with our school leadership or communications teams. 

Tuesday through Friday, I teach a small-group literacy intervention during the second block of the day. I work with high schoolers in groups of three to six, working on content-specific science and social studies textbooks with a set, scripted curriculum. This targeted and structured literacy intervention (called REWARDS) works to help fill in any gaps these students have. I see each of my five high school small groups twice a week. Tuesday and Wednesday are fairly light with only one group meeting each day. After I teach my first block of the day, I have a break where I do some more prep, and then I walk over to our lower school campus, which is 15 minutes away. It’s a great way to step outside, get some Vitamin D, and break up my day. 

I arrive at the lower school during 5th grade recess, and I am always greeted by shrieks and 10 year olds running up to me screaming “hi Ms. Hemley!” with big smiles, eager to show me their cool new earrings or tell me about how their hockey team won a tournament over the weekend. The energy is very different from our other campus as the kids are much younger, and you can see it in their bubbly cheeriness. 

After engaging with the fifth graders,I head to my classroom and set up. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I teach an entire advisory class of nineteen 5th graders. I use the same literacy intervention as with the high schoolers, but at a lower level. Rather than sitting in a small room together around a table the way I do in the high school, at the lower school, I am up and presenting at the front of a big classroom. After our hour together, I pack up and put on my winter gear as I prepare to walk back to the upper campus. By the time I arrive, it is almost 1pm and so I have my lunch. 

After lunch, I am free for the rest of the afternoon. This is when I will focus on my strategic project. Sometimes this entails writing or conducting research at my desk, but often, it means I am going from class to class to observe the different teachers and their best practices. Oftentimes I will observe the same teacher for a whole week, if not more. This is helpful to really get to know a teacher’s practice in-depth, and to follow a lesson all the way through its instruction. 

Then, at 2:45, school is dismissed. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I have door duty at the high school. I hold the door and greet students as they leave the building. I take this as a great opportunity to mingle with students, learn their names, and work on building relationships outside of the classroom. By the time the last few students are trickling out, it’s 3pm, and I typically only have 30 minutes left of the day. With those 30 minutes, I will often finish up whatever it was I was working on before heading out for the day.