Team Teaching Sisters: Planting the Seed

Tricia & Kaela

We are soul mates, best friends, inseparable companions, twins by heart and sisters by blood. Most people who meet us for the first time assume I (Kaela) am the oldest because of my slightly “louder” presence. In truth, Tricia is the older sister by a brief 13 months. Our sharing started at a very young age and the fact that we work better together has always been intuitive. Throughout life we’ve been able to communicate in a manner where completing one another’s thoughts is routine and many times no words are exchanged, yet we know what the other is thinking. In college we had an idea. We wanted to share a teaching job and help each other raise our children. At the time we had no idea how this would happen, we just planted the seed and believed our dream would come to fruition.

1-11 Cousins

The writing was on the wall when Tricia left a district only to land a job in my district. Two years later, with support from administration in Edina Public Schools, we were granted a job share. We work at a middle school in Edina, MN. Our schedule has been a dream as far as a job share is concerned. We teach 9th grade English every other day. When we aren’t teaching we run a family daycare. In 2008 we started with five children at daycare. My brother and his wife are teachers also. My sister-in-law watched the babies in the family as she worked on her degree. When she completed her schooling we took over the daycare and finally watched the seed we planted several years earlier bloom. All in all there are 11 children between the three of us. Over the years we have been able to love and adore this beautiful bunch of cousins, while we pursued our passion in our professional lives to educate youth and make an impact on today's learners.

For years we called our learners “students” but our motto has changed. Four years ago our district eliminated levels in 9th and 10th grade English. The leaders of this change felt each and every student should have access to rigor and as professionals we should be able to educate ALL our learners regardless of a “course label”. Thus began our first steps on an enlightening path to understand personalized learning. Our hope is that other teachers can be inspired and energized by reading about our journey. As we started to re-write our course, and in reality our personal philosophies in education, we encountered many challenges. An innate fear of change and intimidation from people who simply didn’t understand our intent could have hindered us. But neither did because from day one we have practiced a Growth Mindset. Now we move forward in our work feeling empowered by a mindset that is frankly contagious and unstoppable.