When you run the grueling sport of cross country, it’s easy to slow down. You’re running at a high rate of speed for miles and all you want to do is slow down. Then someone comes along next to you and you have to speed up. It may be a teammate or somebody from some other team.
Those people are called pushers in the sport of distance running. They challenge everybody in the race to be better, to go faster. Who else in our PLC does that for the rest of us then Mary Beth Tietgens of Maine? Nobody. Mary Beth (MB to us) pushes everyone around her to get better at this hard work.
MB is a major force for good on this PLC in that way. Just when you thought you had read all the research, she quotes some obscure article and you learn something new. So Mary Beth is a colleague in the best sense of the word “collegial”. That is, she teaches us stuff. We get better at our craft because she is in our PLC.
Where is MB’s focus? On best practices. It’s always on best practices according to the research. If an idea is not backed up by research, she would probably be curious about why we are talking about it.
Why is that important to us? Because without intelligent, passionate, dedicated, fearless teachers like MB out there, we got nothin’. Congrats MB for just being you and “bringin’ it” every day. We appreciate you so much. You represent that rockin’ state of Maine really well.