Dr. Angela Venters

I would say my family. I am the baby, and I've always had my family - my mom and my dad - in my corner. My dad has passed away, but I know he is smiling down on me every day. My mom, every achievement that I have, I shoot her an email or text message and she's posted it on Facebook because she's proud of her baby girl. My husband has been in my corner the whole time as well - he's the one who told me, just wait for your time, and that has panned out. And then my daughters. I had my oldest daughter when I was a junior in college, and for some people, that would have been a challenge that would have made them stop, but actually I had my highest GPA that semester. She was my motivation, because I knew that I wanted to be in a position where, even if I didn't have her dad, or if I didn't have a man, or whatever, I could take care of myself and my children, and then I can be someone that they can look up to.

You have to have a growth mindset in anything that you do. You have to be patient and just kind of wait for the right time to make the different moves in your career. There were times when I wanted to apply for certain roles and would go to the interview and not get that particular role, and I remember my husband saying, well, it's not your time, it's not your time, and when it's your time, it'll be your time. That has kind of been my little jargon that I always say to myself - it's timing. Not my timing, but when it's God's timing, everything will begin to fall in place, and you don't have to force it. That's kind of how I ended up here at the service center, because everything just kind of fell into place. I did the interview, and within a matter of days, they were calling me and offering me the position. I didn't have to force it. So I just think that you have to be patient and just wait for the timing when you're making those different career moves. You can't force it.

You have to have some tough skin. The times are a lot different from when I first started. There's lots of oversight and lots of change, and you have to be adaptable, you have to be flexible, and willing to change with the times and the research. So, continuing to grow, continuing to read and develop deeper understandings of your content area and education as a whole, and knowing how things are transpiring so that you can change and not stay stagnant in what you're doing and how you're teaching. I have a daughter that wants to be a teacher - that's all she'd ever wanted to be - so this advice is something I think about for her too.

Right now there is this whole science of reading shift, and everyone is just - especially here in Texas - having to really adjust from what we used to teach, which were things that aligned with the miscues and the MSV and all of that. An opportunity is that we have an opportunity to make sure that we are providing students with the right kind of instruction from the very foundational years, so those early years of literacy, when their whole journey is being molded. Getting that right is where my heart is - making sure that we are providing the right kind of instruction and not creating gaps when we already have lots of students that are already coming from homes where there is a lack of literacy, and so they come to school already behind, and so we don't want to create additional gaps. Another challenge right now is the challenge with the digital age. Students have access to some kind of digital device - even the most affluent families and the most impoverished families all have access - and so we are competing with that on a daily basis. It has really shaped the way that students' brains are developed and how they're learning. When they come into the classroom, we're having to compete for attention because we're not a video game, and we don't have all of the cool graphics, so we're constantly having to perform and keep them engaged. Engagement opportunities and being able to provide students with the right kind of early literacy opportunities is kind of where we are at this point in the education game.

I value transparency. I don't want you to sugarcoat it, just tell me. Even if you think it's gonna hurt my feelings, I would rather for someone to be transparent with me and let me know up front, so that if there is a decision that I need to make, I would rather know that than you just kind of beating around the bush, and then maybe I missed out on something because I didn't know that this was coming. Even with me being a supervisor of my specialists that are up under me, transparency is something that I want. If there's something that they feel is not working in the right direction, or something that may have been said that maybe I didn't think of what I was saying and it hurt someone's feelings, I'd rather them come to me and let me know that, rather than feelings being hurt and then things start to shift and you're not really knowing why it's shifting. So really being transparent in all relationships, personal or professional, I think is one way to keep everyone aligned and to make sure that everyone is being respected and honored in all situations.