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Noraa Ranset - Elementary School Teacher - Murray, Kentucky
133 Plays7 days ago
Join us for an inspiring conversation with Noraa Ransey, a National Board Certified Teacher with over 20 years of experience in the classroom. Noraa shares her journey as an educator, the challenges and rewards she's encountered, and her unwavering commitment to her students and public education.
In this episode, you'll learn about:
- Noraa's passion for teaching and her dedication to professional development.
- Her involvement in various leadership roles, including SBDM Minority Representative, KEA Executive Council, and Teacher Leader of the Kentucky Education Commissioner's Teacher Advisory Council.
- Her commitment to diversity and inclusion as the State Ethnic Minority Director.
- Her contributions to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards as an NBCT Cadre member.
- Her insights on the future of education and the importance of technology in the classroom.
Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of National Board Conversations where we spotlight incredible educators. I'm your host, Edward Santiago. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Nora Rancy, a National Board Certified Teacher with over 20 years of experience in the classroom. Nora is a passionate advocate for public education, a champion for diversity and inclusion, and a true inspiration for her students and colleagues.
00:00:22
Speaker
So honestly, I never thought of myself as being a possibility for national board certification, just like I never saw myself as a teacher in my early days, even though I knew at five that's what I wanted to do. Nora's dedication to her students and profession has earned her numerous accolades, including Teacher of the Year and Kentucky Volvaline Teacher Achievement Award.
00:00:41
Speaker
She's also been actively involved in professional development, mentoring, aspiring educators, and serving on various boards and committees. Join us as we delve into Nora's journey as an educator, her insights on the challenges and rewards of teaching and how she currently impacts the education world. I won't hold you much longer. Here's my conversation with Nora.
00:01:02
Speaker
Nora Rancey, thank you for joining me on the podcast. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. How about you? I'm doing well. It's a Friday that we're recording, so it's exciting that where the weekend is coming up. Yes, always. Let's get right into it. Can you give us a brief intro yourself and to current role? Sure, absolutely. First of all, thanks for having me. I'm always excited to be invited to anything national board, but I am a national board certified teacher in the area of literacy, and I'm currently teaching year 20 in first grade at North Callaway Elementary in Murray, Kentucky. For me, teaching was my dream job, and here I am living my dream.
00:01:36
Speaker
You're 20. That's really awesome. Yeah. That's really fast. It doesn't doesn't seem like I've been doing it this long, honestly. Like time just goes. I was just, oh yeah. So what are your three favorite foods?
00:01:50
Speaker
So I decided I had a rich palate, but it was easy for me. yeah Definitely asparagus. I had some last night in prime rib. I love when a restaurant has a prime rib special. And last, I didn't know if I could say this or not, but I'm adding it anyway, sangria. I like going to different things and trying. as a There's always some kind of sangria blend on them the menu and it's always good. OK, we love it. We love it. What are three songs that shaped you?
00:02:15
Speaker
thought I thought really hard about this one because I love music so much. Honestly, music was a big part of my childhood. I was in choir and band, and it it's where I just naturally fit in. But I went back and kind of related it to teaching. And so on on repeat, I played this song by Fantasia, I believe, all the way to my teacher interview. I left managing Arby's to go to this interview.
00:02:37
Speaker
and And I really didn't think I was going to become a teacher, so I just played it and listened to every word, and and it was successful because I'm still there now. And then another one, it's related to education too, but you really could relate it to a lot of other things. It's Mariah Carey's hero. I really believe that all teachers are are heroes, and if that one comes on, it's all the way up, and I'm singing very loudly. Lately, my my palette has been for Taylor Swift. If you're not a Swiftie, I'm sorry, but I'm really sorry.
00:03:04
Speaker
you know And I have a shirt on right now, who's afraid of little old me. And specifically, I wanted to say that one because um we are fighting for education on our ballot here in Kentucky. We have a voucher amendment coming up that would directly affect our public schools and I channel her when I'm speaking to groups and when I'm trying to make sure everybody knows how important it is and what it would do to public education. So I ah channel Taylor Swift on some of the hard days because it's not for the wary.
00:03:30
Speaker
No, she has a she has powerful music and is very ah moving with a lot of her work she puts out there. So it's really cool, really cool. oh The one sports team that has your heart, and if you're not a sports fan, a movie you can recite line for line.
00:03:44
Speaker
So honestly, the only sports I see are those that my own kids and my school kids invite me to. I'm not a sport girl, I never have been, but I love movies. And this is probably gonna sound cheesy too, but the one that's always at the top of my list is Beauty and the Beast. And I really thought, why why do I always go back to Beauty and the Beast? And it's really simple. If you've seen it, the library, the books. That's a beautiful library for her. Who doesn't want a fairy tale ending? So it has all the things.
00:04:11
Speaker
That's a very beautiful library. just You get lost in that thing. All right, so what is some hobbies you have outside of being involved with the school and community? That one was hard for me to answer, too. But number one on the list would be traveling. But honestly, most of the traveling I get to do is because I'm doing something educational, like going to Washington DC for National Board or NEA or some of these other adventures that I go on. But I've made it a a habit to go at least a day early or stay a day late and do something that I've not done before, like see the monument or go to a museum. So I love traveling. I spend time with my five kids, four of who are grown and college age, one's about to be a teacher in December. And then I have a fourth grader who keeps me pretty busy. And most recently recently I've been upgraded to Nanny and a two month old Viola. So I'm i'm on grandma status now. Oh man, oh man, time is flying like you were saying. Yes, definitely.
00:05:04
Speaker
All right, so you touched on it a little bit earlier, you left Arby's, you left being a manager at Arby's to get into education, but and it was always your dream. So why do you, I guess that's why you remain connected, but what pushed you, like other than like it being your dream, what keeps you connected to being in education?
00:05:19
Speaker
So for me, this ah it's not a unique story. It's honestly becoming more common. But my life was changed because of an educator. I was 15. I was on my own. I worked three jobs, one of them managing the entire store of Arby's. And I was destined to work in local factories like my whole family before me. We we grew up in trailer parks. we had SNAP benefits and all the things but my sophomore year I had an English teacher that called me after class and I was sure I was in trouble I was like what could i have possibly done but um she she pulled me aside and had my journal sitting there and she's like you write like a college kid why are you in my class and I'm just looking at her like
00:05:56
Speaker
I don't know that's what they signed me up for, but um that was honestly the first time I ever heard my name in college in the same sentence. It hadn't even occurred to me that was an option, but she worked really hard with me. She got me in a program called Upward Bound that I'm still passionate about today. She got me on the college path and the rest is history because 20 years later here I am, like I said already, living my dream life in a classroom. So to that point, what were you like as a student and how did that influence you as a teacher?
00:06:24
Speaker
This one is probably going to sound like an awkward ah answer too, but it's honest. As a student, I tried my best to have the power of invisibility. And what I mean by that, I was the oldest of three, three three daughters and in a single parent home. And that home included a parent that suffered with addiction. So I grew up really quickly being the oldest. And for me, school was my safe place.
00:06:45
Speaker
It was my consistent place. School was where I could do my best to just be normal if there was any normal in my life. And as a teacher, I remember that with each kid that I meet. Each has a story that they don't always share with you but and they deserve a positive experience. And I spend a couple of weeks at the beginning of every year just building relationships with my students and building a family within my classroom because I learned quickly. I cannot control things that are going to happen to my students outside of the school because some terrible things happen at times.
00:07:13
Speaker
Hard to remember that school really is a safe space for a lot of these students, right? Like their home lives are usually not, they're not usually, but sometimes not the greatest. And so being able to come to school and learn something and hang out with their friends is ah is a place for them to be, like you said, normal, almost invisible in a way, right? Just the average kid.
00:07:33
Speaker
So ah what do you enjoy most about being a teacher? Oh, there's so many things that I could list. But honestly, I love when the struggles turn into successes. I've taught a lot in 12 years in third grade, and and I saw it even there. But more specifically in first grade, I'm teaching kids how to read. And that's something that's going to affect the rest of their life. And it's not an easy process. It doesn't happen overnight. They don't always come to you with a good foundation, setting them up for for reading, but once that struggle turns into success and you see how proud they are of their life, that's an an instant happiness. But once they're they're mine at the end of every year, um every student and every family I've had knows that once you're in Team RainZ for life, and I've been around long enough now that I've seen them grow up and become
00:08:23
Speaker
careers that I knew they were gonna be when I met them when they were little in my classroom. And I've had some ah parents bring their kids back to me. And and it's really quite magical, the process like that, where you get to see not only what you can do in a year or a month or or nine weeks, but when you see them grow up to be that human that you hope they do become. no and And so you're National Board Certified Rockstar Educator, you pursue, what pushed you to pursue? What was your journey like? And did you achieve on your first try?
00:08:53
Speaker
So honestly, I never thought of myself as being a possibility for national board certification, just like I never saw myself as a teacher in my early days, even though I knew at five that's what I wanted to do. But I had a mentor, her name is Holly Bloodworth, and quite a few times I would come and do a presentation for her.
00:09:11
Speaker
or something like that. And she would tell me every time, why don't you consider certifying? and And I just didn't, it just wasn't on my radar. So I started a rank one in library. I thought maybe that would be something I would enjoy, but two or three classes in, I decided this is not what I wanted for my future. And I had a teammate who said, I'm going to try National Board, you should do it with me. So we decided to try and we and we did it together. And so what was a coaching conversation you had or some advice you received that was most helpful to you?
00:09:41
Speaker
So going through the process with that same friend, I've held on to this quote, comparison is the thief of joy. and here's why. My teammate received high marks like fours and she even had like some 4.2s or 4.5s. I didn't even know that was a possibility for her score on every single entry that she submitted and we were submitting and sharing together and I worked really hard but I never came close to her level of scoring and I honestly got nervous that I wouldn't certify when I saw hers and I compared it to mine and I thought I'm not working hard enough and I just realized that she's working on a completely different area. She was working on middle child generalist and She was naturally ah and an amazing writer. That was just a talent for her and that was something that I struggled with. It was really hard for me to write about myself. It just didn't seem natural to me. It didn't seem authentic to say, look at me and I'm National Board Certified because that was a whole process for me. I had to train myself how to do that. But in the end, we both certified and in in the end, our journey was different and everybody's journey is just different in their own.
00:10:43
Speaker
And you made it. You're national board certified and you've gone done a lot of leadership and all these things. yeah So how has national board certification opened up new opportunities for leadership and mentorship? with um the From the beginning, I went through the new process and I think that was part of it because everybody was like, what's this new process like? We need somebody who has done it to be on our committee. So um I was invited to to state committees and local committees right away to be just a mentor and just to explain what the new process was like. And um later I got was able to enjoy and join initiatives like NAME and the Kentucky Department of Education. Most recently um we worked on your early career educators certifying. And a lot of the work I did went was around teachers of color overcoming barriers because I do fall in that category. And when I saw that 12% of national board certified teachers are
00:11:36
Speaker
teachers of color, it became a passion for me. And I really think part of my struggle was just being able to write and coming overcoming some other barriers that I just need a little bit of mentorship now. So I try to do that and give back. I've also been blessed to serve on the national level. They included me, national board included me in the DEI committees and most recently the What Book Revisions. So I found myself at tables locally at the state and nationally and honestly, every single time. It's just unbelievable that I'm even sitting there.
00:12:05
Speaker
So you talked about it you're on the what book revision committee. What was your what was your what was your role um in helping with the revisions? So again, surprisingly, they made me the chair of that committee. And I had been through a couple of committees before that directly related to this around DEI. So they they did know me and they didn't know who they were getting. But I think it's important for me to stress and just say, put this in the space that all of these committees are made up of expertise, of educators with an expertise like me. My expertise was the classroom teacher in a Title I school.
00:12:41
Speaker
in Kentucky, but the whole committee was full of educators with different expertise that made this work um done with fidelity by teachers for teachers. So can you describe what analyst, so we had the public ah public comment period, can you describe what analyzing the public feedback and incorporating that into the final text?
00:13:02
Speaker
Yes, so every comment suggestion question was looked at multiple times. We did some in small group. We did some in large group. We came together and looked at them all again. And if there was some somebody thought we need to relook at, we did. And and it was so important because it made the document stronger. It was important that the readers reading what we put forth were getting what we were hoping they were getting. We we had to go through that feedback and use it. It was a very valuable part of the process to make sure that the final result was what we were intending to put out. So what were some of the most significant challenges y'all faced during the stretch, during a um couple of meetings y'all had?
00:13:40
Speaker
So anytime you bring a ah group together, there' there's gonna be challenges. But for me, I would say it was just having to come to consensus on everything. I mean, we truly met consensus before we moved on, on each phase. And that can be tough because there's a lot of different people in the room. But also in the challenge, in the conversation, in in the document, it was made stronger. And I believe personally, it is,
00:14:05
Speaker
the best it can be. And I like, just like life, we're going to have difficult questions, different difficult challenges, difficult situations, but it makes us better. And we were able to do this together and and with lots of conversations and and in breaks. And then coming back to it, we were able to reach consensus and move the work forward. That's awesome. And so how were you guys able to ensure inclusion and unbiasedness in the webbook?
00:14:32
Speaker
That was a number one priority for all of us. And from the beginning, we were guided by charges of the DEI committees that did work before us in standards. And the and we had these guides in front of us. um My co-chair was Tracy Krause's superintendent. And he um was really good about focusing us with norms. And um he always brought it within the norms, brought us back to those documents and these charges that were put before us that were what we were purposely looking at the web book for.
00:15:00
Speaker
So it was a part of every piece, every meeting, every Zoom, every email. Sounds like it was very a very intense process the whole way. Yeah.
00:15:14
Speaker
yeah All right, so mean now we're going to get into some teacher recruitment, try to get some people to take take a step into their and the next step in their careers. So if you had to sell the education profession to someone looking to get into it in one to two minutes, what would you use as your elevator pitch?
00:15:28
Speaker
So somewhere along the way, um why teach became kind of cliche. So I like to say why not teach. um If you love kids, if you love seeing a young life changed, um being a teacher.
00:15:43
Speaker
you get to lead a whole tiny tribe of future leaders. Teaching, if that's you, then teaching is for you. I have one year to be a small piece of each of my students and their family's life, but that year often extends to years of staying in communication with them and seeing their success.
00:16:00
Speaker
And teachers change lives every single day and don't even realize they're doing they're doing it. I'm living proof that this is true. Who would have thought that a little girl from the trailer parks of Murray Kentucky would grow up to hold titles like Teacher of the Year and the NBC Champion?
00:16:15
Speaker
but my sophomore English teacher Linda DeVos, I just put her name in the room and she hates when I do that. ah She believed in me and here I am still trying to do the same for each student that I teach. One of my favorite memories in adulthood was when I received national board certification that same teacher was one of the first ones who heard about it and she sent me flowers to school that day and I opened it up and it was from Miss DeVos, my sophomore English teacher who even got me on this track and And she still, after retirement, is still vested in her students that she had in her classroom all those years before. Man, that's an amazing story. That's that's awesome for her. Yeah. All right, so we have a feature on the podcast called the shoulder tap. It's when you give somebody a shout out and let them know they're ready to become National Board certified. So Nora, who are you shoulder tapping today? today
00:17:04
Speaker
So they've heard it from me in person, but I'm putting it out here on on the live feed and we're going to send it to them. But definitely my teammates. I could not be the teacher I am today without my team. Holly Randolph, Morgan Steele, Jessica Rojas, and Aaron Tuggs. We are a first grade tribe that works together in so many ways and and I see it in them every day. They're already in BCTs. They just need to go through the process.
00:17:26
Speaker
and I have to add anyone who never thought they could be an NBCT because that was me. I would i can truly say it's been one of the life-changing experiences for me before that I had logged a thousand hours or more of PD and this by far was the best PD I've ever done and if I could go back and do it sooner, I did it in year 10, 11 and 12, I definitely wouldn't do it sooner because if you're listening to this and thinking about it,
00:17:52
Speaker
Just reach out to me and ask me all the questions that will happily support you on your journey. Oh, we love it. We love it. Nora Rancey, thank you for joining me on the podcast. Thank you. I want to say thank you to Nora Rancey for joining me today and sharing her incredible story.
00:18:07
Speaker
Her passion for education and her dedication to her students are truly inspiring. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to National Board of Conversations on your favorite podcast platform. And leave us a review. We'd love to hear your feedback. Remember to check out our show notes for links to Nora's work and the organization she's involved with. Until next time, stay inspired and keep striving for excellence in education. Thank you for listening and see you on the next episode.