Storyworth excerpts* 3: Maureen

*This post is a collection of my excerpts from different Storyworth chapters. I put some of the bits about Maureen together here.

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Maureen

2005: Director of Instruction

      Maureen Dockendorf had a way of making things happen. In 2005, she was the Director of Instruction for my district. Though I had known about her for years, I distinctly remember her talking at a packed Winslow Gallery just after she was made Director. She was talking passionately about the importance of teachers and the difference we were making every single day in kids’ lives. As she was talking, my palms were getting sweaty, my heart was beating faster, and this giddy warm glow was spreading through my body. “Omigod,” I realised, “I am in love with Maureen Dockendorf.” Not wanting to keep this from my wife and being fully secure in my marriage, I went home and told Brenda my feelings for the new Director of Instruction. “Oh yeah,” Brenda said, “I’ve heard Maureen speak before. I know how you feel.”

      Maureen was so inspiring. It was like Obama or Oprah speaking. You wanted to do your best because Maureen told you you could. Maureen did not just have followers or admirers, she had disciples. My friend David told me he knew what a “cult of personality” meant after working with Maureen. People say that I am like a chameleon: I can walk into a room and blend in with the background. Maureen was like a reverse chameleon: she would walk into a room and the room changed. Tom D said that Maureen could tell an auditorium full of administrators that they were going to pick up the dog droppings after the meeting and everyone would jump up and say, “That sounds like a great idea!”

    When Maureen became Director of Instruction, she overhauled Winslow Centre and the way professional development was done in our district, (and later the province). I worked for Maureen as a district Literacy Support Teacher (LST), and Maureen was as I thought she would be—amazing to work for. Because she was running the whole Staff Development department, the LSTs did not get as much time with her as I thought we would. The times we did, though, were impactful.

    Below is a page from a picture book I wrote, a primer about the LSTs. I thought this page captured Maureen. (She loved it).

    There was this one time during an LST team meeting and we were all a little stuck. Maureen brought out a magic wand (seriously) and asked, “What do you need?” And we would ask for things like “more time in this school” or “some funds to buy that resource.” Maureen would tap her magic wand with a “ting!” and say “Done!” She was our Fairy God Momo and in an Oz kind of way, she gave us permission for things we did not know we could ask for.

Back to the 1990s: Meeting Maureen and Action Research

I had actually met Maureen years before. During a winter break in the 1990s, I was invited by some friends of friends to go cross-country skiing at Lac Lejeune at a little lodge called Woody Life. It was great. We stayed in quaint log cabins, skied all over, then dined at the lodge, buffet-style. It had a family-run feel and catered to families.

  During one of the dinners, I was standing in the lodge near the entrance, waiting in the bar line and I noticed a family come in. The boy, who was about 10 years-old, came in like he owned the place (he didn’t) and headed straight for the buffet, followed by his sister who was in her early teens, then the non-descript mom with her hair pulled back in a frizzy pony tail, and the dad. The dad had the bluest eyes I had ever seen. He took his place in line for the bar behind me. I smiled at him, and after a pause he said, “Great skiing today, eh?” and I said, “Yeah.” He followed up with “Great place, eh?” and I said, “Sure is.” Then the line at the bar started moving, and we did not talk to each other again the whole trip, but would nod to each other once in a while.

  Yeah, it does not sound like much, but in another one of those odd coincidental moments, a year later, I was photocopying something at back at school, and I happened to see a notice pinned for teachers who wanted to look at their practice a little differently. I went to the first meeting and found out it was a grassroots group of teachers who were starting something called “Action Research” (later “Learning Teams”). It involved doing personal, qualitative inquiry into something we wanted to develop or explore in our teaching. The people in this group were amazing: Nadine (future Superintendent) who started the group, my old friend Gloria (future coordinator), Elspeth (future principal), Jill (future principal), Louise (past coordinator), Colleen (future mentor), and a few others.

  The facilitator for this Action Research group was someone named Maureen. Towards the end of the session, I realized that I had “met” Maureen at Woody Life. We had never spoken, but she was that (non-descript!) mom of the family with the blue-eyed dad in the bar line. After the session, I asked Maureen if she had been to Woody Life, and she had. And that was my real introduction to someone who would later be a massive influence in my professional life.

2011: CR4YR

    In 2009, Maureen was the Assistant Superintendent who partway through the year, gifted my school with a 1.0 teacher. This triggered a series of events that led to my journey with classroom design and this blog. (Class share -> storing my teaching stuff in a storage room -> revamping the storage room so much that teachers sought a quiet oasis there -> wondering how classroom environments would affect students).

    Then around 2011, I was involved in this brilliant provincial project called Changing Results for Young Readers, or CR4YR. The Premier of BC at the time promised that ALL students in the province would be reading by grade 4. Maureen being Maureen, wondered what we as teachers could do differently to make this statement a reality. CR4YR brought together teachers from all over BC, asking each teacher to focus on a struggling reader and to observe that child and then try something new to improve the student’s reading.

     At first, Maureen started the pilot project with about eighteen primary teachers from Coquitlam, Surrey, and Maple Ridge. I was one of the six teachers from Coquitlam, along with my buddies, Kyme and Deb. In the end, the pilot project was incredibly successful. We started small and manageable, and grew our “interventions” organically from the observations we made of our target child.

Somehow I got to be the poster child for CR4YR

    The next year, CR4YR scaled up, across the province. I was still a participating teacher, but I was also facilitating the project in schools in my district. I attended these huge meetings organized by Maureen with districts across the province. At one of those big sessions, one of the other teacher-participants noticed I was from Coquitlam, (at that time, we were known for innovation and inquiry), and asked me a bunch of questions about the learning team/CR4YR process. Maureen overheard us talking, liked my answers, and pulled me aside, asking if I wanted to take on facilitating some remote districts. I was flattered but deterred by the thought I would be replacing Maureen as their facilitator. Maureen. There was no way I could fill those stylish stilettos.

    Then she asked a question that would change my life for two years. “Seeing as you don’t want to be a facilitator or a coordinator,” Maureen asked, “what would your ideal job be?” which led to...

2012: Bright Ideas Gallery

  A couple of days later, I pitched the idea of an online innovation magazine to Maureen. I kept running into colleagues from my district who were telling me about these amazing things they were doing or trying, and I wondered why I had not heard about these ideas before. Coquitlam was known as an innovative district, so why not share these innovations with each other and try to spread more innovative practices? I would go into schools, talk to teachers who were trying different, promising techniques, then write up these ideas in a blog-like site that I would send to every teacher in the district each month.

I loved doing the Bright Ideas Gallery. There were so many exciting things being tried in SD43: cutting-edge technology, environmental and gardening initiatives, collaboration and inquiry-based learning, design thinking, SEL techniques, etc. 

But doing B.I.G. did mean that technically my contract at my home school was down to 0.4 FTE. I was worried that this reduction would have job implications for me in the future. I must have mentioned this concern to Maureen. She counseled: “You know, Greg, sometimes people like us have to take some chances and make our own opportunities.” It was not until later that I realized that when she said,“people like us,” she was including me.

After the Bright Ideas Gallery, I went back to the classroom and Maureen went on to be the Superintendent of Learning for the province. I owe Maureen so much; so many opportunities, so many experiences, so many good times, and introducing me to so many great friends.  

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