POWARRful Teaching Strategies: Helping Teachers Thrive
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down what Dr. Marquita Blades of POWARRful Teaching Strategies. Marquita has built an inspiring business using key teaching strategies she learned in the classroom. In May, she is hosting the Teach to emPOWARR Conference. With topics ranging from problem-based learning to must-have tech tools, the conference aims to take a holistic approach to supporting the many roles teachers play.
I sat down with Marquita to learn more about her professional path and her upcoming conference.
Lily: I'd love to start with you telling us kind of how you got to this point in your educational journey. What led you here?
Marquita: As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a teacher. So I'm really thankful that I had a chance to do that for 16 years. I was a high school science teacher, primarily teaching biology and chemistry, some physical science, a little bit of physics, and then a little bit of everything else. In 2016, after about eight years into a lupus diagnosis, I just really couldn't keep up with the physical demands of being in the classroom every day. Particularly because I was a science teacher and I was so hands-on and it was so active, the day-to-day just became too much for me. So at that point I resigned and started my own education business.
Lily: Being a teacher is so demanding physically, emotionally, and mentally, even without a health struggle. But when you put on a health struggle on top of that, it definitely can be very hard to sustain. I'm glad that you were able to find a way to put yourself first and move forward to create something that worked for you… all while making a bigger impact beyond the classroom.
Marquita: When I left, I tried my best to stay as attached to the classroom as I possibly could. I ended up creating POWARRful Teaching Strategies, but it didn't start out as POWARRful Teaching Strategies. It just kind of started out as me speaking at different conferences. Because I didn't know what my groove was going to be now that I wasn’t a classroom teacher every day. But I knew that I had some things that I enjoyed doing that I wanted to share. So I said, okay, I'll just start going to conferences and doing presentations there to see what people latch on to.
One of the things that I realized as I put together my presentations is that no matter what topic I was sharing, whether it be student engagement or something specifically related to STEM, there was always a recurring theme that kept showing up in my teaching. I realized I teach in a pattern, no matter if it's biology or chemistry, even if it's a summer program, there are these skills that just keep showing up in every lesson that I design. That's when I sat down and packaged my method into POWARRful Teaching Strategies.
Lily: I love how you describe your journey of self discovery. It’s hard to know what we’re really good at without time to reflect. When you were doing those speaking engagements or starting off as a consultant, did you have a certain topic or subject that you were speaking on?
Marquita: Initially I was speaking on teacher burnout, I think because I just kind of fizzled my way out of the classrood and that's what was fresh for me at the time. It took my husband saying, “You never present any of your STEM stuff. You're a science teacher, you've done all this STEM work, but I never hear you speaking on STEM.” And I'm thinking, yeah, how did I miss that?!
Lily: I’ve definitely noticed that what we take for granted about ourselves can turn out to be our biggest assets.
Marquita: I stumbled across this quote from David Shivers and now I share it with all of the teachers that I coach: “What's obvious to you is amazing to others.” I think that the things I did in the classroom that helped me be successful, sometimes I just didn't think of them as being enough to share with other people because I did them every day. So at that point I started putting together some Next Generation Science Standards workshops. That's really where I found my groove and saw how much my POWARRful Strategies tied into that.
Lily: That's amazing. I love that. So tell us more of what you do now with the POWARRful Teaching Strategies. Is it still a mix of STEM and those strategies? Or is it separate?
Marquita: It's a mix. I have my POWARRful Teaching Strategies that I weave into all of my science trainings. Then I have standalone POWARRful Teaching workshops, particularly POWARRful Teaching Strategies for engaging students. I also have an online version of that, that I launched last year when everyone had to start teaching virtually.
Lily: What does POWARR stand for?
Marquita: POWARR stands for predict, observe, write, analyze, research, and report. These are skills for all people, not just for students. We need them in every situation:
Predict: What do you think is going to happen? What do you think about this?
Observe: What have you noticed? What can you observe in this situation?
Write: It's not always putting pen to paper, but simply what can you say about this? What can you tell someone else about this situation or this topic?
Analyze: Can we look at some things that happened before and kind of piece together what we see going on?
Research: I would say this is the most difficult of the POWARR skills. Because this is where students really have to kind of look at what has been done before and compare that to what we're doing now. But that doesn't always have to mean reading articles and books. It could be watching a documentary or looking at commercials on TV, anything.
Report: Now that you have some understanding of this, what does this mean to you? Or what does it suggest for you moving forward?
Lily: Awesome. I love that. That seems like a great framework that can be used in so many different subjects, grade levels. It could be with kindergartners, it could be with 12th graders, it's something that can be adapted.
Marquita: Yes, absolutely. Any teacher can use this in any classroom, any subject.
Lily: I know that you have a conference coming up, I would love to hear more about that.
Marquita: The Teach to emPOWARR Conference will feature my POWARRful teaching strategies, but I've also pulled together my personal and professional network of educators. The speakers are a lot of current classroom teachers, building administrators, district practitioners who are still doing the work every day. Because I do believe it's important for teachers to hear from their peers and to hear not just what worked for me when I was in the classroom, but what worked for someone last week with their own students. I also wanted people who are experts in things that I'm not. I'm an instruction girl. I'm all about instruction and engagement, so sometimes I may overlook some of those topics that are really important to other teachers. I wanted to make sure that I brought in the people who would highlight those things that I know I'm not going to talk about in my sessions.
The Teach to emPOWARR Conference runs virtually on May 15-16th. You can also follow Marquita on her website, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Know other inspiring educators we should talk to? Submit your ideas here (& feel free to pitch yourself!)