By April Clark Honaker
Last fall, Shauna Vallery became a curriculum strategist at Ruston Elementary after teaching for 24 years. Vallery is currently pursuing and will graduate in May with a master’s in curriculum and instruction with a focus in reading from the University of Louisiana in Monroe.
This additional education and training makes Vallery well-suited for the curriculum strategist position, which she said is a position in which she coaches the English language arts and social studies teachers.
She uses her extra knowledge and resourcefulness to provide her peers with support, whether that means assisting them in unpacking a curriculum, providing interventions, or helping them manage a behavior problem. Vallery also has continued to teach small groups of third, fourth, and fifth grade students who are reading below grade level. In these groups, she provides special interventions to help them be successful.
In addition to earning her master’s in May, Vallery holds a bachelor’s in elementary education from the University of North Texas, which she earned in conjunction with Louisiana Tech University. Vallery moved to Ruston before completing her degree in Texas and did her student teaching residency through Louisiana Tech. This unique scenario allowed Vallery to graduate with a teaching certification in grades K-6 for both Texas and Louisiana.
Vallery said she no longer maintains her Texas certification because Louisiana and Lincoln Parish have become home to her, but she holds a lifetime certificate in Louisiana.
“I have absolutely loved my 24 years of teaching,” she said. “This is my passion.” Vallery never wanted to be anything else. It was being able to work with resident teachers that caused Vallery to change her course.
“I loved working with new teachers,” she said. “It helped me to grow and challenged my way of thinking and teaching. Being able to influence a new teacher to go on and have their own teaching journey is so rewarding.”
Vallery said that if you’d asked her 10 years ago where her teaching career would lead, she would not have imagined that it would lead to becoming a curriculum strategist, but serving as a mentor to resident students changed her. It pushed her out of her comfort zone.
“My scope of love began to include not only my own students, but also my fellow teachers,” she said. “I felt becoming a coach was the next step in my journey.”
Now, as a curriculum strategist, Vallery said she is still very much involved with teachers and students, just in a different role. Although her role now involves supporting other teachers, she still gets to remain in the classroom with small groups and gets to have the best of both worlds.
In addition, she gets to have a bigger impact. “Impacting teachers ultimately impacts students,” she said. “In some way, I’ve touched all of our students through their teachers. It truly trickles down. Now I’m impacting our entire student body, not just those in my classroom. They are all my students.”
Vallery’s new role is demanding in the sense that she is constantly learning new things to then share with the teachers she coaches and the students she continues to teach. “Every day brings a different question from a teacher,” she said, “and every day a student has a new need.”
Vallery relies not only on the knowledge gained from being a veteran teacher and from her extra education, but also on her own ability to research and keep learning. She then has to process what she learns so that she can use it to help others be successful.
“So you can teach an old dog new tricks,” she said. “There’s always new learning that I can apply to my career and then turn around and share with others.”
