People throughout Holyoke know Mary (Lavelle) McAndrew. Some know her as the daughter of two teachers from a long-time Holyoke family. Many know her as the mom to three kids, all Holyoke High School graduates. Some know her as a vibrant 1st-grade teacher reading “Hooway for Woodney Wat,” by Helen Lester. Others know her as a supportive colleague helping them reflect on early literacy data and planning a lesson in response to the data.
To know Ms. McAndrew is to know someone who is planful and deliberate, yet responsive and joyful. She is kind and compassionate, yet undeterred. All of us who have had the good fortune to cross paths with Ms. McAndrew have learned something from her—not only a skill, but an approach to thinking.
Mrs. McAndrew is currently the expert teacher/coach of English language arts at Kelly School, where she has been for the past six years. Prior to working at Kelly, she served as the districtwide director of English language arts, an instructional coach at Sullivan School, and 1st grade teacher at Sullivan. Before teaching in Holyoke Public Schools and before HPS offered preschool, she taught preschool for 10 years at Mont Marie. She initially thought she wanted to be a speech and language pathologist, but fell in love with the art and science of teaching. Her joy for literacy led her to find a perfect spot in first grade, a critical year where students take all their letter recognition and decoding skills and begin to read simple stories.
Teaching is the family business. Her dad was an English teacher for the Springfield Public Schools. Her mom—after an 18-year maternity leave to raise nine children—was also a Holyoke teacher. Mary recalls being home at night, her mom sitting in her chair, correcting papers, joyfully laughing at a cute story one of her students wrote. Her daughter, Abbey McAndrew, has followed in their footsteps and is currently teaching English language development (ELD) at McMahon.
As much as Mrs. McAndrew loves teaching children, she also loves learning with adults. The leadership team at Kelly strives to instill a culture of adult learning. Mrs. McAndrew explains that a culture of adult learning includes “giving us the grace to keep learning and getting better together.” Not only does she model her interest in and the importance of learning in her roles in Holyoke, but she also participated in the Lynch Leadership Academy, a collaborative, equity-centric school leadership development program. The opportunity to participate came at an important time for her because she felt that Holyoke is doing the right work that we need to be doing, but not seeing the results in terms of student learning. She knew she had to think about her work differently. She especially appreciated the equity-driven approach to Lynch Leadership. She has shifted her practice to look at sub-group data. How are students with disabilities (SWD)IEPs doing on a certain skill or standard? How are multilingual (MLL) students learning? The belief and research shows that if our SWDS and MLLS are learning, then all students will be learning.
Kelly is one of the largest buildings in the district, so when HPS went to separate elementary and middle schools, Kelly became home to a lot of programming. Kelly has the dual language program through third grade and also offers a strand of traditional sheltered-english immersion programming. They have many preschool classrooms and a couple substantially separate classrooms. When asked how she balances the needs of so many teachers, Mrs. McAndrew talked about how she leverages district supports, such as the dual language coaches and Associate Director of Early Learning, to support teachers directly and also accelerate her own learning. She still strives to have a touchpoint with every teacher, but knows that it takes a community of adults to support a community of children. In her work with both adults and children, she aims not to solve problems for them, but to teach them to solve. Taking the stance of a learner and a coach, she is the first to say, “What did you try?”
As a literacy teacher and coach, Mrs. McAndrew has many good book recommendations! For children, she recommends “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” by Lynne Truss which is a witty book about the importance of grammar and punctuation and any book from Helen Lester. She recently enjoyed Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, which is also a short series on AppleTV. She just reread “Tattoos on the Heart,” which is about a Jesuit priest who works with people who are incarcerated and struggle with addiction. She appreciates that the book recognizes the value in every human, which is an approach she exemplifies in her work in Holyoke.
Mrs. McAndrew earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Elms College and is a graduate of Holyoke Public Schools.