While sitting in an interview for an assistant principal candidate, Evan Winkler, Brandywine Middle/Senior High School Principal (then a phys ed, health teacher and coach), heard what the person up for the role was talking about and thought “I feel like that’s what I love about teaching.” After seeing that same person be successful as an administrator, and with some encouragement from building leaders, Evan pursued his certification through MASSP’s Path to Leadership Program and started the next phase of his career.
“It’s been a cool journey,” he said. “Never thought that’s where it was going to go. But sometimes, I guess that’s kind of what happens in your career. I think sometimes you don’t really know what’s going to happen. You kind of go day by day. It’s just nice to have those encouraging mentors along the way that kind of help you get where you are.”
For the last year, Evan has been part of the Innovative Leaders Network, a program designed to equip forward-thinking leaders with the tools, strategies, and mindsets required to lead schools in an AI-integrated, student-centered, and future-ready landscape. He said he signed up because he felt like schools could be different.
“When I was at EdCon last spring,” he said, “I went to the session that Ryan Cayce led about the ILN, and I was just really excited to kind of jump in and kind of try to learn different ways that we could do school and try to find ways to get started.”
Last year, his superintendent went to an event where the Michigan Education Workforce Initiative was partnering with Arizona State University’s Next Education Workforce to implement team-based teaching models in Michigan. Evan said he was a bit reluctant to implement the program which would put 50 kids in a classroom with two teachers. He had questions.
“How does that work? How does it look? And just from reading our (ILN) book (‘From ReOpen to ReInvent’ by Michael Horn) and having all our sessions where we’ve seen other schools – Forest Hills, Northern, Byron Center – and then some of the people who’ve talked on some of our webinars have talked about team teaching,” he said. “So I was like, ‘OK, this is something that really does work.’ And so I was really excited … we brought it here. I got two teachers who are trying to start it, and I’m really hoping it’ll kind of spread from there, where other people want to do it.”
The ILN has been a really great learning experience, he said. He noted the collaboration with colleagues and Ryan getting the cohort to think outside the box about how else they can “do school.”
Next year, Evan and a pair of educators will be implementing a pilot team teaching group, combining seventh and eighth graders into a single science class.
“The nice thing about science standards is you just have sixth through eighth grade,” Evan said. “They just have to get a certain amount of standards. So you can cover them at different times a year or in different years. You can decide. Seventh and eighth graders are going to be paired together in one classroom. So it’ll be kind of fun where the eighth graders can be the leaders, and kind of have a little more responsibility and the seventh graders kind of learn from them. They’ll all learn the same content one year, the next year they’ll all learn the next set of content.”
It will not interfere with testing or anything of that nature, he said. The teachers have already tried some of this in practice this spring, and it’s gone even better than the team thought it would. He said the teachers really like it and so do the kids.
While he said he’s hoping that the start of team teaching will turn into something bigger, he knows he’s got to have the right people who want to move forward and do it.
“You know, I can’t just be the driver or the person who’s going to do it for them,” Evan said. “The two teachers that want to do the team teaching, want to do it. They’re excited about it and putting in energy and the effort into it. But if two people don’t want to do it, you know, it’s like one of those things too, right? It’s not going to work. So you gotta have the right people in the right spot that are engaged and excited about it.”
Evan said he’s always been a visual learner, which he believes drew him to sports and being a PE teacher.
“Me sitting behind a desk and listening to a lecture as a student was not my favorite thing,” he said. “And I don’t think it’s many students’, either. Behaviors are worse and learning is not going to be done as well when you’re in that kind of situation. I think most kids can get into the flow state, you know, you would say our engagement state, you’re not even watching the clock go by, right? You hear the bell ring and it’s like, ‘Wow! What happened?’ Because it’s so much fun, because you enjoy what you’re doing, because you’re so engaged in it. So is it going to happen every day? No, but if it can happen a lot of days, I think we’re going to do some right things for our kids and our teachers. I think teachers are going to enjoy it too.”
With around 350 kids at his school, Evan said they can’t offer every CTE class, but there are local districts where they can send students. After transporting kids to a hub, they then get on a bus and go to Buchanan for sports medicine, Niles for allied health, or they go to a new culinary program or a building with construction trades class.
“It gives them that real world experience that’s relevant, and they can find out right now, ‘Hey, do I like this? I’m not going to go on the college path. I want to go on the career path.’ So there is some of that individualized learning that we have,” Evan said.
Next up, Brandywine may start to implement what Evan saw through an ILN visit to another high school where the students run a business creating and selling products in chemistry and business classes.
“I’ve talked to my CTE director and some CTE teachers about ‘How can you guys work together to make products and sell products and give students that real world business experience of what it’s like to build something and have pride in what you make, because it’s going to be sold to someone?’” he said.
Brandywine also offers courses in collaboration with a college for credits, as well as AP and honors classes in their building.
“I just feel like the more you can offer and the different things you can offer in your school, everyone can find a spot where they find some passion for, or find the best way that they learn too, and that will help them be more successful and excited about coming to school and seeing what’s next,” Evan said. “So some of that is just kind of getting into how can we continue to move forward and continue to grow?”
While, he said, he feels like they’ve always been great at relationships at Brandywine, he thinks the more he and his staff can engage in learning, the more they fulfill the mission statement: Engage, educate and empower our students. He said it’s great when principals can have uninterrupted time together, in-person or online, to hear what other people are doing.
“At times you don’t know what other people are doing in their buildings, because you’re so tied up and busy with what you’re doing in your own building,” he said. “So just being able to collaborate with other leaders across the state and have that opportunity that Ryan has given us, and go visit schools and see other great things that people are doing that we can help reproduce or make it look like that in our school.
“Because, you know, I keep hearing, there’s no one model, there’s no one way to do it. It’s just, how can you make something work at your building that’s gonna help continue to make it innovative and new and reinvent how school used to be. So it’s been a lot of fun. I’m really glad that I went to the session last year and joined the ILN. So, you know, there’s a reason I went. It’s working out so far.”