good evening i'm to go through the welcome to another edition of this week in education my guest tonight is been in them i have beer who is or who the district supervisor of instruction and she recently joined us in january i believe and has  been a very very welcome addition to the princeton staff have been in the first of all thank you for dropping by and being on the show tonight thank you for having me it's great before we get into some questions and talking with about you are just like the audience knows more about you and that has been a teacher at heart her entire life growing up in england she was convinced by a neighbor's french oh parrot a teacher english and has been involved in education in some way ever since in her professional life been in there has worked as an e teacher a curriculum resource teacher a staff development trainer a supervisor of curriculum and professional development and a principal currently she serves as the supervisor of instruction and as a child of immigrants she is most interested in the emotional aspect of learning and using experiences as a springboard for discovery and knowledge acquisition a very nice bottle thank you and i know that you've been a world traveler but maybe you could tell us a little bit about your background prior come to district so actually in my previous role i was a principal of a k through two building and that was for the last four years previous to that i was actually a supervisor in the robbinsville school district and i was in charge of curriculum k through eight and professional development k through twelve i feel like i've had a lot of roles because even before that i was a staff development trainer coach k through twelve actually being pre k through twelfth all models and before that  a curriculum resource each year where it was as you mentioned i was supporting teachers coaching them and working with them to impact the curriculum and my first role was as an e s l teacher but as i mentioned every single role that i've had  been extremely valuable one for me i have genuinely learned from each role that i've had as i am doing now as well in this role i'm learning a lot from princeton and hoping i'm giving some to giv individuals who come from different backgrounds and you know your family has moved around over the years and those wondering whether you could discuss you know where or what lessons you have you learned from the experiences that you've been you know fortunate to to enjoy ye so i feel so extremely lucky to have been the parent of immigrant my grandmother was born in africa she is of indian origin and my grandfather moved to africa from india on my mom's side and then on my dad's side they lived in india so both sets of parents moved to england as children and that's where they met and were unable to then they moved to london  moved to california so not only did i learn from the experience of my grandparents which i feel fortunate enough to have heard my gram for mother and grandfather tell stories of their experience working in factories coming over was the typical immigrant experience no money living in one room and all of those hardships that i am lucky enough not to have had and then moving again to california where although we spoke english the cultural difference was huge and it actually was my first lesson and education which is that we moved and i had a very difficult time i had been a student and because of the differences in the way the school systems were i ended up failing a lot of my courses in seventh grade and found this a very difficult thing from having been a top student to grade and again made the adjustment again to another culture yes new jersey and california are quite different just a little bit and then and then i went to undergrad at rutgers and grad school it's easy n j but the biggest lesson i learned i think and this is something that i really carried with me comes from that time that we moved to california and that is that in order for children to learn actually not to children adults anyone you have to feel comfortable you have to be able to take risks you have to know that it's ok to fail you have to be able to speak out and that connection that is made in a classroom or any teaching and learning situation whether it's one on one whether you're in a dance class it doesn't matter that connection has to be there has to be communicated between the teacher and the student and so that's one of the things that i try to instill try to instill as a principal and to my teachers we talked a lot about connecting with the students and it's also something that i talk about with the teachers here in princeton as well so that's good to yeah so when i know you have to work with children i do you know and i'm sure that you'll be telling growing up in you know one place yeah rather than you know moving to different places i agree and on some level i do i do you feel like i the good part is i have friends in california i have friends in england that i can now go visit on the other hand it was definitely a very difficult prospect to make friends coming here in tenth grade and i think as a result i don't know that i made the closed connections in high school as i made the could have had i've been in one place for a long period of time i found that at the time that i was growing up in the sense that there were a lot of groups of kids which is not unusual in high school people tend to find their group and i was one of those people who became friends with lots of groups which was good and bad and i think probably made me a more social person and able to connect with people i know when i had originally moved from england to california i was not outgoing at all i was quite a nervous nellie and when we moved to new jersey i think out of i had to do it i had no choice but to become a little bit more outspoken and actually one of the first things i did when i moved to france because i ran for student council i didn't know anyone and i thought why not right so i went for it i didn't win but i got to know quite a lot of people in the process so yeah yeah so they got to know you too yeah they did it so i i do look forward to being able to have my children grow up in a place where they can kind of have a hometown and feel really like part of the community just just taking that for instance i know that one of the values one of the  goals of the district is for every child to be known and i was wondering since we have a lot of students who come to us you know from the university or the seminary or writing institute for advanced studies and those students sometimes  are here for a short period of time when the parents leave and move around quite a bit and i was wondering whether or not that's something that you feel a connection with that you can see in these students that they really know that they're going to hear for a short period of time yeah i do feel connected to them and i think actually that was one of the reasons that i became an e s l teacher originally because i think i had an extreme empathy for the movement and for being different than knowing that i didn't know the culture and my parents didn't know the culture and didn't know how school systems worked and that the students that are coming to princeton also probably in very similar situations and there are difficulties of acclimating to a culture even if you speak the language there are stages that acculturation that students go through oftentimes it could be a very smooth process and other times it can be where students start acting out a little bit because they're dealing with all of these conflicting issues within themselves whether it's a language issue the cadence of the language the accent  or just the fact that the school system is vastly different you know it could be it could be even the way things look the way that students walk in a line down the hallway and how they transition from class to class when they're in the high school there are all these little things that we take for granted an everyday basis that make life easy for us and when you're struggling to make sense of all of those small tiny procedural things on a daily basis it's exhausting and confusing and so in those instances learning consent can be secondary because they're just struggling to survive so i always tell teachers when you have students that have moved here you really need to give them at least six months to kind of let them acclimate and just take that into consideration as you watch them because they they just need that transition time they need to understand our system know you wanted to be an educator and the work so much about education so in hindsight i do believe that my love of education became when i was a child as i mentioned during the bio but i did not go to college to be an educator my mom was a teacher ok she became a stay at home mom i have three siblings and so she stayed with us while we grew up which i'm privileged to have had and when i was in college  i got to rockers and physics is not for me i decided to make the switch to sociology and anthropology but in the meantime i had said to my parents you know i think i might want to be com teacher and my parents said i don't know i don't know about stability and in some ways they were still pretty traditional in their thinking about you know what i should be and so i finished my degrees and anthropology and sociology and did them ended up substituting for a year i ended up substituting and a few years all classrooms found that i absolutely loved it and up going back to grad school for my degree in education so it was a winding path the irony of the entire situation is that now out of my three siblings and i two of the three of us sorry three out of the four are all in education and we're all actually administrators and my sister in law the wife my brother she's also in education so literally it's gone full circle and everything originally my parents thought again is it certainly has run through my mind so it's a plus and yeah it definitely is it is really you so when we talk about your position in the district you're your titles called supervisor of instruction so in order to clarify what that really means you know how would you describe your role so i would say that i am a support system if i'm going to describe what i do i basically am i am doing a lot of evalu but i am also providing a lot of great feedback to the teachers i'm setting up observations so they can go into the other teachers to learn from them i've also been working with our assistant superintendent we went to try state consortia and we did some work on creating a tool for medical mission it's it's a little bit of the a jack of all trades which i actually enjoy i'm learning a lot about the curriculum at the different levels and the wonderful things that are happening here in princeton and i find that my role is also to kind of see the big picture of all the strengths that are here in princeton and be able to capitalize on the biggest thing is when you're i go back to that lesson that i learned when i went to when i moved to california and the thing that has worked for me and that i found in all of my roles is building trust with the teachers and and all stakeholders actually you need to be able to have a relationship with the people you're working with and ultimately we end up spend spending more time with our colleagues in some cases than we do with our own families so it's important to get to know the teacher and where they're coming from i use a lot of questions to kind of find out the thinking behind what i see so that i can guide teachers in the right direction and often times when we are discussing an observation that i've seen we end up coming up with things together as opposed to me directing what's happening and i find that when that happens the teachers are more likely to implement those ideas because it's become a collaborative effort  so i i really do think and that's been a phenomenal part of my job is although i'm extremely busy and i'm running around from school to school  i feel like actually doing the pre conferences which is the meeting prior to an observation has really helped me to get to know teachers where they're coming from what their expectations are and how princeton works and again allows me to see all the wonderful things that are happening here so let's talk about some of those wonderful glass so as you go from school school and it's very it's like it's different because you're going from elementary schools   as far as what is happening you know with both students and staff at the various grade levels so i've noticed that there's it struck me within the first week actually is that there is a big emphasis on independence for the students and there is coupled with that probably partly because of that and and due to that is that the teachers are able to be very innovative and i have to say it's sort of the big i don't want to say bubble but it's it's a group effort and what i mean by that is there's a lot of creative freedom here in princeton which means that their teachers can come up with things on their own and try them out in their classroom and just as i think risk taking is important for students i think it's equally important for teachers and they're able to take those risks and you know i've seen wonderful things happening during focus times at the elementary schools the students are doing research projects they're presenting they're allowed to have choice i know mr cohen dr cohen the supervisor of science has been doing something wonderful with the hydroponics and in in one of the classes in an elementary school one of the teachers is doing stop motion movies then they're all these wonderful little things happening in the in one of the media studies classrooms that i saw  the students were giving presentations and the presentations that they gave were very comprehensive very thoughtful they were critical they were essentially running the class by themselves and the teacher was sitting on the side becoming a facility facilitator and for me that was the best classroom experience or environment that i could ever hope for when the teacher when the teacher is able to be the facilitator and the kids are learning from themselves and driving their instruction zaps when they're going to learn the most and so those are the little pockets that i'm seeing everywhere springing up and i i think that that's commendable for the teachers and for the administration here in princeton because that fostering the innovation and just risk taking is a wonderful thing but i think there's a lot going on you know as you said we have a wonderful and students and a lot of good things going on the district one of the things you know will be happening both now and in the months and years ahead i know that you know we talk about students at their classrooms think it goes back to so as you mentioned when we were younger it was very teacher driven the teacher sort of asked a question or presented the material ask a question we answered we did a worksheet we went home and did homework and we're going back right not very exciting but now i think the focus needs to be and is on problem solving so what gets you and me excited is at least for me is when i come to work and there's a problem how am i going to help this teacher do something it gets me started looking in the curriculum it starts me looking at the standard gets me researching videos they can you get me reading articles about that particular subject and then i sort of synthesize all the information and then i have to think about how to tell the future so the same processes that we do and get get us excited i think that those are the same ones that need to happen with the kids they need to see relevance in what they're doing they need to you know how things are applied it's sort of the google age now and my dad who again comes up said to me when i was in ninth grade and i remember very distinctly time he said the finger has no gender and this is a push button society and he meant that to me being a woman in the society but i truly mean truly believe that quote applies to every child at this point it doesn't matter what background you're from it's a push button society so we need to learn these to teach the students how to research and present and to be able to put together information so i and i think the way that teaching is going to go lot we sometimes have role models who fact give us a positive word and i was wondering if you could share with us a role model or two that maybe if wants your life and who serves as a positive influence for typical immigrant story of moving to england adjusting to the culture and england at the time was i would say quite racist and where sikh so he does wear a turban and had quite a few difficulties growing up with adjusting to people not being so kind and unfortunately he he did go to college and i guess his res and handed up dropping out because somebody was one of professors was very unkind to him so he ended up working in his father's jewelry business and building up business and was very successful  but he always regretted not finishing college so his were grat has been a driving force for him to make sure that we had everything we  needed in order to succeed and that result is something that i admire and he taught himself he read encyclopedias and dictionaries when obviously the internet wasn't around back then and he continues to learn he continues to be a voracious reader and and so i definitely admire that about him  another role model i have is a teacher that i had in ninth grade mr graef nelson graf he allowed us to call him by his first name in one grade i thought that that was pretty as in ninth grade are pretty cool  was let's say a little i'm conventionally wore birkenstocks every day and rode his bike to school and i remember people saying that he was he was a tough teacher and one of the things he made us do that i still have is he he had us keep a journal and he told us that we could mark pages w if we didn't want him to read that page and he would read our journals he read every single one of our journals and made little comments back and forth and it was the way that we could as a fourteen year old you know you have a lot of things to the fourteen year old it was a way that we could express our emotions no matter what it was about sometimes it was about assignments and sometimes it was just whatever we wanted to write and it was a way for him to connect with us and you felt like even though you didn't talk to him maybe but you knew he was listening and i distinctly remember when i was leaving on my last day that i was in saratoga california he sat with me on the step outside our classroom we had open and open campus so there were no hallways it was all outdoors and he with me on the on the step and he reminded me to stay strong and he talked about he was actually leaving school too so we were talking about our worries about moving and i still stay in touch with him to this day he's a professor at a university and we talk he's a professor of education so we talk about what i can say we're in touch that often that about a couple times a year we e mail back and forth was great yeah it is and i think most teachers have actually i think most people could probably dig deep in thinking about a teacher who was able to affect them and believe in them and and hopefully inspire them so and i hope that i can do that for others and i hope our teachers can do that for their students too for my last two and is actually my husband we've been together many years actually  and he's always pushed me to think differently where we're probably as most couples are opposite which can be infuriating at times and but most of the time he challenges me to think differently and he he works in the corporate environment doing venture capital and so he he and i have a lot of discussions about leadership and and organizations and so so he's he's quite insightful has has different perspectives sometimes an idea although we find that there's a lot of similarities tale because ultimately we're all humans and we on with so that's our show for tonight i will see you next week on another edition of this week and education have a good night