There are some teachers at the high school who choose to put themselves in the position of a student and decide to take outside classes or pursue different avenues of learning.

According to business teacher Brittany Stevens, she has done a lot of self studying this year, enjoying Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) where one is able to take free classes online. MOOC allowed Stevens to participate in classes as much or as little as she pleased, so it worked around her schedule while also enabling her to use new ideas for her classes.

Stevens earned her Master’s in Educational Leadership where she participated in a year and a half of school on top of her job at the high school. She got her degree through a program called EDCO Educator Leadership Institute where she worked with a group of 30 other teachers from around the Boston area, as well as learned under professors with experience as principals or superintendents. Her classes were once a week for four hours after her teaching job.

According to Stevens this was not always easy to balance.

“It was really interesting to do. It was like students feel, I’m sure,” Stevens said. “The balance was hard because I wanted to be a good teacher still, and I wanted to be a good partner, and a good friend and everything else, so it felt hard to juggle.”

Chemistry teacher Alexis Murphy, who spent five years taking 10 semesters of graduate courses outside of the high school and earned another Master’s, also said that it could be hard to balance classes, homework, test and a family in addition to her normal teaching job. But according to Murphy, the benefits of taking the night classes were worth the challenge.

“I loved it. It was learning a lot of new things I was interested in, and it gave me sort of a night out to myself to do my own thing,” Murphy said. “I enjoyed going to class and being a student again, and I got to remind myself what it is like to be a student again because I am assigning all of these things to my students, and so it’s nice for me to have a sense of what does that feel like when your teacher is assigning you all of those things.”

Stevens also likes the idea of putting herself in her students’ shoes.

“One of the reasons I always try to be learning something, other than it’s good for you to do, is that it’s good as a teacher to remember what learning feels like and to struggle through things,” Stevens said. “I try to learn some languages because I’m not naturally a very strong language learner; it’s something that is challenging for me. And I like feeling the challenge of trying to learn something because I know my students feel that, and it’s a good thing to remember that feeling yourself.”

English teacher Robert Primmer took a summer course through an organization called Teachers as Scholars, with Harvard professor Theo Theoharis, where they talked about modernist novels they read together. Now during the year he is taking a graduate tutorial where they decide the reading list and curriculum for the class and meet about once every two weeks to discuss the reading. According the Primmer he takes what he learns in these classes and applies it in his teaching.

“Last year I taught “As I Lay Dying” with my juniors, and then this summer I took it, and then the intention is to then expand on what I did last year using some of the discussions and the techniques and thoughts that we went through in the summer,” Primmer said. “This current tutorial is very much focused on some text that I have already taught to my juniors this year or intend to later on.”

After being a student, Stevens changed some of her teaching methods. She now doesn’t make her students present in front of the entire class and instead makes them present in small groups so that the students can stay engaged and focus on what they are hearing as opposed to listening to everyone present for a very long time.

According to Murphy, taking graduate classes helped her to be able to go into more depth in her classroom at the high school and allows her to key her students into topics that they will learn in their other science classes in the future.

In addition to these outside classes helping teachers in their own classrooms, Primmer said there are other benefits to taking these courses.

“It provides some graduate credit, so there’s additional credit hours that are helpful in terms of professional development in terms of salary,” Primmer said.

Primmer also said that the credit can also count towards maintaining his teaching license.

Stevens also said that there are financial benefits to having a higher degree of education, and in addition, taking these courses helps her in her future goals.

“I am considering thinking about leadership in some way, so studying that is part of getting the liscenship process,” Stevens said. “So if I wanted to pursue educational leadership I had to go and get a Master’s at some point.”

According to Primmer, another reason for taking classes outside of the high school is that it allows him to do what he really enjoys.

“I’m an English teacher, right. The idea of finding joy in books and talking about them and discovering more about what is going on under the surface, that to me is a mystery every time; that’s the joy of reading, that’s why we read,” Primmer said. “That’s why I teach it, that’s why I pursue this profession.”