Dr. Rena Hawkins is the principal of Maple Elementary School in the Smithville School District in Missouri. She was recently honored by being selected as a 2018 Missouri Association of Elementary School Principals Exemplary New Principal. Rena co-hosts the ShareMo Edu Podcast with Dr. Eric Carlin. 

I was lucky to meet Rena on a panel with Adam Welcome and loved her passion for teaching and learning. So I just had to have a conversation with her. I was also able to enjoy time with her at the ISTE Conference so she took a selfie. Below are a few excerpts from the podcast along with some great pictures and resources from Rena:
 
About you and your family
I met my husband in the summer 25 years ago and we’ve been married for 23 years. My husband is Jason Hawkins and is a Psychotherapist at Truman Medical Center in Kansas City. We have 3 children. Our oldest, Serena, 19, just finished her freshman year at Northwestern and wants to be a music teacher. Harley is 16 and is a true outdoorsman. He loves football, hunt, and fish. Elaine, 15, will be a freshman next year in high school and loves to sing and loves drama.

Journey as a Teacher to Principal
I always wanted to be a teacher and was a teacher for eleven years. I taught first, second, and fifth grades. I moved back and forth between Missouri and Florida three times in my life, twice as a child and once as an adult. My teaching experience spanned from areas in Missouri to Florida and back. After teaching, I moved into an instructional coach role for six years and one year as the K-12 ELA curriculum coordinator. Following that, I went into administration and was the assistant principal in Smithville for 2 years before taking over the Maple Elementary (K-2) as lead principal 2 years ago where there were 500 K-2 students.
 
Transitioning to Maple Elementary PreK-6
The Primary School just finished its last year as a K-2 school and is now a PreK-6 school. For years, K-2 children in Smithville were bussed to Maple Elementary. The district is in the process of building a new elementary school and all three elementary schools will open as PreK to 6th-grade schools in the fall. So my building is going through major renovations this summer.

One of our major changes opening as a PreK to 6th-grade school is we are starting multi-age co-teaching classrooms. We are breaking down walls between six classrooms and will have sliding glass doors between them. There will be multi-age co-teaching with first and second grades so the first graders will get to loop with those teachers for two years. We have done looping in the past, but the way we are doing looping with co-teaching models is new to us.

Changing Everything
With the change in the model and a new school, I lost two-thirds of my teaching staff to the other two elementary schools. I belong to the Missouri Department of Ed’s Leadership Academy this past year where we had regional meetings and toured different schools in the area. I toured a school and saw co-teaching with the two teachers at the same grade levels. I came back to my superintendent and asked: “why are we going to open Maple Elementary with the same model when we can make a difference?”
So he suggested that I research multi-age co-teaching. Once the teachers got a taste of facilitating the leadership hour with another teacher in the co-teaching model, they liked it. I had a feeling that there were a lot of teachers interested but nobody knew who was going to be staying at Maple at that time. After much planning with the schedule, we decided to start with a first/second grade co-teaching model with 3 first grade and 3-second grade classes. We have a new curriculum and plan to go slow by starting small with a workshop model, team building activities, and social-emotional learning strategies.