In the past, I was advocating for greater transparency, process, and clarity, and in many ways that challenge has been met with new processes and responsiveness to ideas in the past year. This ready response and greater transparency has put me more in the know of what is going on, and allowed me to focus into the classroom efforts with greater alinement to systemwide goals and focus.
This level of greater transparency and organization has also helped me to understand the roles and positions that exist with greater clarity, and this, in turn, has helped me to identify the parts of the teaching/learning job that excite me the most, and the parts that I am expected to carry out. I can better use my time thanks to this clarity. And as I've written before, the main thrust of my work now is the following:
- collaborating with colleagues, families, administrators, and students to develop a dynamic classroom/grade-level community with a focus on developing students' social-emotional learning, emotional intelligence, and learning-to-learn behaviors and attitudes.
- effectively teaching physical science standards and STEAM with meaningful, engaging, empowering, hands-on, standards-based learning experiences.
- effectively teaching mathematics with a focus on the standards, assessment and analysis, hands-on learning experiences, project/problem based learning, the math writing process, worthy tech-integration, and continued professional learning so that the teaching and learning relates to both tried-and-true techniques as well as new research and understanding of how students learn and apply mathematics.
- Supporting reading/writing instruction as led by my colleagues and with efforts related to RTI and signature projects such as the Global Changemakers project.
It continues to be true, that I need to coach myself ahead in view of the multiple potential paths that exist in education, paths that sometimes compete with one another and paths that can hinder the view of what really matters with regard to the work you do.
So at this juncture, the goals are more of the same, but important goals nevertheless, goals that forward the teaching/learning path with clarity. Onward.
