The end of the year brought multiple new professional challenges--challenges outside of the classroom focus, and challenges that impact my growth and work as an educator. I am mindful of the learning these challenges bring to my work.
As I move forward professionally, I am focused on the following areas of teaching and learning--areas I've written about multiple times, and areas that profit from continued focus and depth.
Learning
My primary responsibility as an educator is to help children learn. Hence I'll focus my summer study and research on the topic of learning both broad and specific. The broad focus will find me reading books and writing about learning from multiple view points. The more I understand how children learn, the better I'll be able to teach.
Math
I will study math regularly using Khan Academy as my "teacher." Khan is accessible and provides me with a quick review of all the math I will need to teach fifth grade next year. Truly it's an amazing site. I hope to use Khan Academy with my students too as an integral resource as I've seen how powerful this resource has been for many students this year. I will also take a math course to jumpstart the year's teaching. I'm looking forward to the learning and share the course will bring.
Science
With many new science units to learn and study, I'll read and play with science materials this summer. Step by step I'll unpack the science standards, review system-wide materials, and develop science activities and units of study. Since the math curriculum is broad and deep, I'm hoping to integrate lots of math into these science units as well.
Reading and Writing
As noted before, I'll make biography the framework for the reading/writing component of my science/math curriculum giving students a chance to hear the stories of famous scientists, technologists, engineers, artists, and mathematicians. Over the summer, I'll keep an eye open to this information as I read and view videos, books, posts, blogs, and tweets. Perhaps, I'll even be able to create a short list of professionals in those fields willing to Skype or Hangout with the class as another way to inspire students' STEAM learning.
Collegial Share and Collaboration
I continue to find that this is a challenged area given the time and structures available for this work. As a classroom teacher with multiple leaders and specialists to coordinate with, I still find that the time for this coordination and collaboration is short since I spend most of the time each day with my students. Yet, I have some new ideas with this in mind.
First, rather than multiple emails, I set up a curriculum share document. On that document I'll list the questions, ideas, and needs related to multiple curriculum areas and share it with the leaders related to the curriculum. That way there's a greater chance for integration, less repetition, and coordination of questions, ideas, and response.
Also rather than asking deep questions on the fly (which is tempting when time is an issue), I'll save those questions for scheduled face-to-face collegial meetings. It's never a good idea to deal with sensitive issues with little time.
Finally, I'll be cognizant of my role expectations. With multiple system-wide, State, and national changes related to teaching/learning expectations in the past few years, that has been confusing. But recent events have helped me to understand the role parameters with greater detail so I'm ready for a new year ahead noting that my primary responsibility is to do everything I can to teach the children in my class well. A role I'm happy to do since I've made a commitment to stay in the classroom.
In that light, I'll also revisit and edit the TeachFocus website I created last year. The website is a reflection guide related to the new Massachusetts Teacher Evaluation system, a system that truly supports what it means to be a wonderful teacher, and also a system that challenges current teaching/learning environments greatly since the standards are broad and deep often requiring supports and time that don't exist in many school organizations.
As I assess the past year, I believe it was a strong year of teaching children well. Our class community has been dynamic, and our projects and learning terrific. Professionally, I still believe the role of teacher is a challenging role as systems change. This change has created disruption in the teaching/learning paths in many organizations, and where that disruption will lead is still difficult to predict as the teaching/learning world depends on so many factors both inside and outside of school systems.
What's most important is that we keep children center stage when we make teaching/learning decisions and develop school systems and organizations. No matter what we do, we should ask the question, "Will this activity, idea, study, or share serve children well?" and what are the elements we define when we discuss "serving children well." That focus is the triumph of the teaching/learning world because when that is our central focus, our work is centered on a most important, valuable, and beloved resource: our youth, and is there a better focus than that?
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