Students may be the ones learning in school, but teachers on campus are still being encouraged to gain some knowledge too as some of them take part in Thursday’s Learning Walk Day where they will visit other classrooms during their conference period to hopefully discover new teaching strategies.

New associate principal Jon-Eric Zaier brought this idea over from Coppell ISD, his previous district, and plans on holding the event more than once this year.

“We’re just trying to promote on going growth for all of our educators and continuing to find new strategies, new activities, new ways to create meaningful learning experiences for our students to help increase student success,” Zaier said. “Being able to take advantage of our tremendous staff and showcasing some of the things they have going in their classroom, then letting other teachers see that, they’ll have an impact on their classes as they go in and pick up a new strategy or way to engage students that they can hopefully incorporate in their classrooms as well.”

While teachers meet with their departments on a regular basis to discuss lesson plans and classroom activities, they don’t always get to see each other’s methods in action.

“[We’ll be] getting new fresh ideas from other teachers and how they have classroom management and use different activities to engage students instead of sticking to old familiar activities,” Spanish teacher Ashli Taquino said.

As a resource math teacher, Cynthia Kays assists specific students in their math classes by providing them with extra instruction, so she often already visits other math teachers’ classrooms to see how they’ve taught a lesson.

“I go into other classrooms as a support person, so I’m able to see how another teacher teaches, and I can bring that into my classroom and use different tools that they do,” Kays said. “It’s like in tutorials when you go to your teacher, and they give you one view, and you don’t quite get it, but if you go to a different teacher for tutorials, they might able to teach it to you a different way and you’re able to understand it.”