Sunday, July 29, 2018

Honing the Long Term Teaching/Learning Vision

Plans for next year are in place. There will be some revision and refinement as I meld these plans with colleagues' summer work, team meetings/professional development, and in response to students' needs and interests.

As I work to fulfill the details related to the 2018-2019 school year plans and prep, I am also thinking of the long term vision for my teaching/learning practice. What will I do? What matters?

Overall my primary commitment lies in building a top-notch grade-level program with colleagues to teach all children well. To meet this goal, the work I need to do includes the following:
  • Embed SEL into the academic program.
  • Develop a more multi-modal, hands-on, relevant, visual, and brain-friendly math program.
  • Increase my skill, knowledge, and teaching of coding and computational thinking across disciplines.
  • Work with colleagues to develop our scheduling and collaboration to better our service to each and every student. 
  • Develop my advocacy skills to work for betterment in education, the environment, and supports for children and families.
  • Better my ability to foster students' apt collaboration, experimentation/exploration, analysis, presentation, debate, and discourse related to their learning particularly in math and science. 
  • Continue a daily effort to read, research, write, and develop knowledge and practice related to teaching well. 
I want the classroom to be a welcoming, dynamic home away from home that respects and develops each child's individuality as well as our team approach to teaching each other and learning.

There are many groups that I can join and get involved with to better my work. I choose to continue to interact with my online PLN, a group of dynamic worldwide educators and others who positively contribute to my work as an educator. I will also stay close to the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) to support what we can do together as educators to promote optimal professional learning, collegiality, and advocacy in ways that improve what we can do and how we do it when it comes to teaching and living well. Beyond that I will broaden my world view via reading and exploring new places, and I'll share my knowledge and experience via my blog and elsewhere when it's the right thing to do.

This continues to be a time of digging into the details of my work close to home to teach well and effectively develop programs, supports, knowledge, and practice to teach each child with depth and care. I will focus on positive patterns to meet this aim. Onward.