Scholar Spotlight: Shakeyah Scroggins Leads Professional Development for Fellow Paraprofessionals while Working Toward Teacher Licensure
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with and learn more about Shakeyah Scroggins, a JET scholar in the Boston Public School District. She was born and raised in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Currently, she works at Holmes Elementary School, which happens to be the elementary school where she graduated from as a child. Working with kids in her community is important to her because she has witnessed student struggles that led her to want to support them as an educator.
“I decided to start working with kids because there was a situation that happened when I was in high school where a child died in a foster home, and that really pushed me to want to work with kids and kids in my community.”
Before Shakeyah became a JET Scholar, she wore various hats in the education field. She worked in group homes and then in early childhood classrooms. She saw the children’s behavioral and academic challenges in these settings. She wanted to help these kids so she moved on to work at a collaborative in Chelsea for four and a half years in their behavioral programs and then moved into a different program for children with special needs for three and a half years. During this time, she also got her registered behavior therapist license which allowed her to do in-home therapy outside of her school job. This required her to interact with not only her clients but their families as well. After that, she wanted to spread her expertise and bring it back to her community so she applied for Boston Public Schools and got a job at her elementary school where she has been working since 2018. She has also continued to do more in-home therapy in the Dorchester and Roxbury area. Shakeyah joined the JET program last year. Currently, she is attending UMass Boston as she works toward her BA and teacher licensure.
Shakeyah spoke about her experience with the annual Professional Development Workshop Series for paraprofessionals in the district. She explains that she was approached by Colleen Hart, the paraprofessional representative of the Boston Teachers Union (BTU), and was invited to take a lead role in this initiative when she applied to be a para-mentor for the BTU. The purpose of these workshops is to help new paraprofessionals, who come from diverse backgrounds and have varying levels of previous experience in education, navigate schools and become comfortable in the classroom.
“The BTU is really big on preparing paraprofessionals with these workshops because paraprofessionals don't have as much training as teachers do, but they expect us to do a lot of the teacher work in the classroom.”
This workshop series include a wide range of topics such as SEL, self-care, relationship-building, and family engagement. Shakeyah facilitates the relationship-building workshop. The four sessions that she facilitates are broken into different topics. The first two sessions are mainly about relationship-building with the children in the classroom and building. The third session is about building relationships with families, and the last session is about building relationships with colleagues. Shakeyah emphasized the importance of this series.
“We have a lot of things going on in our country. A lot of people have a lot of different opinions about things. So building those relationships with our colleagues can be a little bit of a struggle right now because everybody has a difference of opinion. So we just want to focus on making sure that we keep those core relationships because it takes a village to raise a child. And if we're not all on the same page, then the children know and it affects them.”
Shakeyah took initiative and developed this series by herself when her partner dropped out. She utilized a few resources from a mentor for her first PowerPoint presentation, as well as knowledge from her background as a behavior therapist, and JET professional development workshops.
“Kids don't like to learn from people they don't like, so if they don't like you, they're not going to learn from you. So you have to build that relationship first. And if the parents don't trust you in this, it's going to be really hard to teach their children. It's something that I'm really passionate about. I have a lot of relationships with a lot of the kids in my building, not just the kids in my classroom. A lot of times I'm asked to host a kid who might be having troubles because I do have good relationships with a lot of the kids in my building. So this series is just something that is fluid for me.”
From this opportunity to lead professional development, Shakeyah learned to give people more grace when talking in a room full of adults because she realizes that not everyone is where she is in this field. One of the main takeaways she would like to share through her workshop series is that building relationships definitely makes the job a lot easier. She wants her workshop attendees to feel supported by giving them the tools they need to be able to build those relationships.
“I am hoping that they can take whatever I'm giving them and apply it in the classroom and make their days a little or much easier. You're not going to reach them all. But if you reach just one, you've accomplished the goal. So for me, it's like I want to reach all the kids, but I can't, Right? If I touched just one, then I've made an accomplishment. It’s important not to beat yourself up about not making all those connections because kids are human, they have real emotions and they may not like you and just like you may not like that kid. And that's okay, because we are humans with human emotions. We're not robots.”