Spotlight 4 Success
We're shining a light on education success stories and talking about current trends and topics of importance to the education community. Join us in conversation!
Spotlight 4 Success
Mastering Test Prep in Rural Districts
As Georgia's 2011 Teacher of the Year, Williams offers rare insight from her 33-year journey through all levels of public education. Her transition from classroom teacher to instructional coach to district administrator provides a comprehensive perspective on what truly drives student achievement.
Welcome to Spotlight for Success by American Book Company. I'm Devin Pintosi, your host. I am here with Pam Williams in Bankin County. Assistant Superintendent. Nice to see you, pam.
Speaker 2:Nice to see you too, Devin.
Speaker 1:Great. So tell us what brings you to Gale today.
Speaker 2:So I'm really excited We've got our entire principal team from our school district. We're a small rural district so we have one primary, one, elementary, one middle, one high, but we were able to bring all of our principals with us and we're all getting a lot of ideas we like to admire and acquire, see what other districts are doing well and see how we can bring that back to our own district and help us continue to grow.
Speaker 1:Oh, that is wonderful. Can you tell us a bit about your journey, how you became the assistant superintendent and what your career goals are?
Speaker 2:Sure. So this is my 33rd year in education, and all in public school education. I started out as a classroom teacher. I've worked at elementary, middle and high school levels.
Speaker 2:In 2011, I was actually honored to be selected as Georgia's Teacher of the Year, and so I got to travel all over the state nation it was really cool, really expanded my understanding of education beyond the smaller districts that I've worked in, and seeing how things are very different from one to the other and learning that, even though we may not look alike on paper, we all have great ideas that we can borrow, admire, acquire from one another. After about 21 years in teaching, I transitioned into instructional coaching for close to a decade, really learned there's a different skill set when you're working with teachers and helping us be able to grow and learn. And then since then, I have been an assistant principal and now I'm at the district level.
Speaker 1:Gosh, that is wonderful. At American Book Company in Woodstock, georgia, we are committed to your students' success. As you can see behind me, we have our workbooks and we have online testing and e-books that go on fancy iPads over here, for instance. They're all designed to help your students succeed and have higher test scores on their high-stakes assessments. Give us a call 888-264-5877, or find us on the web, abck12.com, and you can receive a free trial or a free preview book of your choice. Hope to hear from you soon. Bye-bye, can you tell us a bit? I understand you've used American Book Company materials before.
Speaker 2:Yes. So as a high school principal, most of my departments did invest in the ABC books in order to particularly in our EOC courses. We don't use a lot of textbooks in our district. We are very much about rolling up our sleeves and getting into the standards themselves and making sure that we're teaching the standards and making them accessible to the students.
Speaker 2:What I really like in the American Book Company books is the small almost vignettes, the lead-ins. It's accessible for our students who struggle to read, so that's useful. It's very useful as we're coming out of COVID especially and so many students were still absent, that gave them a little look, a little scratch the surface. Where we've really enjoyed the success is I call it the sweet spot, but it's that point that month before the state assessments are given where we're able to have very intentional reviews. We're very focused on our pacing and we don't like to be teaching new content right up until the state assessment day. We like to finish our content earlier so that we can spend some time in that sweet spot reviewing, and we have really capitalized on the use of the American Book Company books and those courses to be able to help us as we're doing that spiral review at that time.
Speaker 1:Well, that is fantastic. What a great way to practice good pedagogy using instructional materials. And have you found a score increases as a result of using the chairs?
Speaker 2:We've experienced over the last four years. We've experienced significant increases, particularly if you go look at our high school, but really across all of our schools, and a lot of that has to do with that spiral review and that intentional pacing, and we appreciate what we've been able to pull, particularly at the high school level with the American Book Company.
Speaker 1:That is wonderful, Pam. Do you have anything else you'd like to share with the Gale community?
Speaker 2:I just really appreciate what Gale provides for us in these different conferences that we're able to attend the intentional networking opportunities as well as a large variety of speakers. That's able to help us as administrators get away from our normal jobs and sit and really listen and soak some things in and figure out what we need to do to be able to take it back and help our schools and our districts become even stronger.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you, Pam. Again, that's Pam Williams, Assistant Superintendent of Bacon County Schools. Thank you so much for participating with us in the program Thanks. David.