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Diana Noonan Has Been Canned
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21 thoughts on “Diana Noonan Has Been Canned”
where is the email address?
Yeah I am waiting on those from Paul. I will get them in there as soon as I can. I want us to send them to the exact same addresses Paul did. Should be later today.
Hello all,
Everyone…thank you for your amazing support. I think it would be best to WAIT. I’m nervous that sending email messages to the superintendent and chief of schools might backfire.
I have a meeting today with my director and will let you know the results.
Please do NOT SEND anything yet.
Thanks!!!!
Got it, Diana. I have a draft ready and it’ll wait unless/until I hear more.
Here are the email adresses.
Thank you!!!!
DPS_Superintendent@dpsk12.org
SUZANNE_CORDOVA@dpsk12.org
Ben –
Paul requested a meeting where we can all go and show up in force.
But, to reiterate what Paul’s message is:
The email must be short and concise, but most importantly state Diana’s contributions over the years to first and foremost and in order of importance:
1) all of Denver Public School Kids, many coming from low socio-economic backgrounds,
2) DPS teachers
3) Educators around the country and world in general.
No more, no less.
I am typing my email as I write this, but have a quick question. Did this new administrator accidentally post this job and can’t figure out how to allow her to apply again/reinstate her, or is the consensus that he doesn’t believe she is the person for the job?
Marc the administrator being new has no knowledge of who Diana is. She slotted into the system and didn’t understand. So yeah I think it has something to do with a glitch. But the result is that the job is posted and Diana can’t interview because she is retired and if hired there would be no income attached to the job bc of all those complicated rules about retirement. She can’t work for free. Now that is my very limited understanding of it. Others reading here from DPS know more than I do.
they could find a way around it as a consultant or part time / cyclical work…
That is the plan, but once they opened it up, last Friday, obviously people will apply and she can’t, because she wouldn’t be paid.
Good grief! One of the reasons I was interested in moving to Colorado was because I’d be near that hub of all things CI led by Diana. This will be an easy email to write.
sent.
Can someone give a brief bio of Diana or a short story of her contributions? I’m happy to support her and trust that she is doing fantastic work for Denver but being pretty new to the CI scene I don’t really know much about her.
Rather than post a bio, which would be too long and we want short today, I’ll just say that since the very beginning of the appearance of TPRS here in Colorado, Susan Gross and Diana Noonan have been the power hitters and transformed hundreds of careers and we can do the math on how many students that is. For eleven years she has been working tirelessly to transform the Denver Public Schools into the only major metro district in the country purely dedicated to comprehensible input The question is what hasn’t she done. Before taking over in Denver she was an AP French teacher at East High School for over 20 years. She worked so hard that more than once she fell asleep at intersections on her way home from work. Along with Carol Gaab she originated and ran iFLT with Krashen for five years now. We have been known to call up Krashen late in the night under the influence of alcohol while arguing subtle points about CI and it is because of her close friendship with Krashen that we could do that. She was responsible for the crucial WL Amendment to the DPS Leap Document which changed the way all administrators see and interpret (and therefore evaluate teachers in DPS) what foreign language teaching even looks like in DPS. She is current president of CCFLT, our state organization, which shows that, like Alisa and Robert and some of the other rock stars here in our group, she can talk the talk, having fully walked the walk, of traditional teaching and explicate the differences with poise, intelligence, compassion and, most importantly, patience. She was last year’s keynote speaker at NTPRS. She has established a CI teacher training program that will probably one day be the template for other districts around the country as they transfer over to this work in the next ten years. She started Learning Labs, the only way to truly train CI teachers, and introduced the model for their uswe into the iFLT conference, a perk you won’t get at NTPRS. She has earned the friendship of so many teachers. She has so far pulled two of the best of the best CI teachers in the United States to Denver – both from Chicago – namely Sabrina Janczak and Diane Neubauer who both say that they came here to work just to be around what Diana has created in reform-minded DPS. She has saved many careers by refusing to give up on struggling teachers by making them her highest priority, which is an amazing thing since most district organizers don’t know many of their teachers and don’t help them, don’t give them any meaningful help in fulfilling the demands of their jobs. Diana in very atypical fashion ends up being close friends with many of the teachers she works with. How often does that happen? Some of the stories involving struggling teachers are very dramatic, because being able to function well at one’s job, to be able to really align with state and national standards, to be able to find happiness in one’s work, those are all pretty big deals. I write that last sentence for those of us who know how hard it is to get this way of teaching going not just in our classrooms, which is hard enough, but also in our buildings, where people of limited capacity constantly judge what we are doing without knowing what we are doing. Diana is a Boettcher Scholar, a very high honor to get here in Colorado. I could go on and on. But again, don’t write what you don’t know, but we just appreciate a one or two line email. I do think we should all make it clear in the first sentence or two of our emails where we are writing from. Like, “My name is Bond. Jason Bond. From Scotland.” That kind of thing.
She has saved many careers by refusing to give up on struggling teachers by making them her highest priority, which is an amazing thing since most district organizers don’t know many of their teachers and don’t help them, don’t give them any meaningful help in fulfilling the demands of their jobs.
I’m really glad you shared this with us, Ben. I do believe this is what leadership is all about. And yet, this “not giving up on struggling teachers” (Ahem, point finger at me) is much easier said than done. It is so important to feel supported by your superiors when taking risks in teaching.
Just mailed it and bcc’d you a copy. Good gosh, I was going to ask if there was anything local related to PD that I could attend in Denver this summer. Hope things work out well for Ms. Noonan.
The learning labs are revolutionary for all domains in education. The best & most visionary professional development out there. I’ll bet they start to crop up in other disciplines. It’s the leading edge.
The learning labs are nothing less than you say they are Alisa. It’s not easy to have fifteen teachers walk into your classroom and do an hour pre-brief, teach two classes and then do another hour of debriefing, but it communicates this work in ways that nothing else can and that is the power of iFLT. Tim, since we won’t do any summer training here in DPS, you can visit during the year, hopefully going around to enough classrooms to get a real sampling of the variety that CI can take, or go to iFLT and watch Joe Dzietzic and Sabrina Janczak and maybe even some other people who have “z” in their names.
I sent two e-mails and bcc’d Ben on them. Let’s hope this has positive results.
You and those who already sent emails may get responses from this Susan person. I hope she doesn’t get pissed because those emails are being forwarded from her bosses to her, which is never a good thing, and I think that that’s what Diana meant by it could backfire. We’ll know soon. I think the big DPS bosses really need to get all hundreds of our emails anyway. The only one who appreciated and understood her work in DPS has been Antwan Wilson, now the Oakland CA superintendent.
I sent my emails.