Science Teacher Shares Story about Leadership

Fifth-, sixth-, and eighth-grade science teacher Stephanie Nebel recently contributed a personal story to the Gardner Carney Leadership Institute (gcLi) website. 
 
Nebel writes about owning, sharing, and persevering through her own missteps, and how asking for help allowed her to learn and grow this last year. Read her blog post entitled “Never Take a Rock for Granite” here.
 
“I appreciate the unpredictability of teaching,” says Nebel. “I can look back each day and say, ‘X, Y, and Z did not go according to plan, so how do I take what I learned and apply it to achieve a better outcome tomorrow.’ I was looking at these moments – specifically missteps – in isolation. Yet as I wrote this article, I came to recognize how important and powerful seeking input and wisdom for an outside source is. My hope in writing this article is that we come to embrace and even celebrate missteps as a necessary part of the process and learn in partnership as a collective. This is not only beneficial to educators, but our students as well.”
 
gcLi’s vision is to make students better through leadership. The organization believes that students encounter opportunities to lead every day and teachers can help students recognize and succeed in these teachable moments. Nebel was the 2019 recipient of the gcLi scholarship for The University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and is a 2017 graduate of the gcLi Leadership Lab. 
 
“Dr. Nebel’s article reminds us of the importance of being vulnerable, especially in front of our students,” says gcLi executive editor Kate Wade. “Additionally, she deftly underscores the criticality of life-long learning, a key gcLi tenet. In fact, Dr. Nebel teaches us that being open to new ideas and modeling that growth mindset increases student buy in and our own empathy for the experiences of the students in front of us. Sometimes, that teachable moment we talk about at the Leadership Lab isn’t our students’; it’s our own.”