Reflective Teaching: A 30-Day Blogging Challenge For Teachers (Day 1)

Goals for the Year:

So I am starting this a little late but as my fellow Tech Coach Krista told me, "What have you got to loose?"

So I do have to figure out goals anyway for when I meet with my admin but these will be more reflective on my own teaching practice and my personal aspirations for the school year with my current peeps.

I think one of my biggest goals this year is to develop deeper meaningful relationships with my students. I believe last year was a bit too overloaded with outside influences, developing my professional teaching persona outside of the classroom. Which was good, don't get me wrong but it was distracting to say the least for my personal lesson planning and relationship building with the kids. I am not sure if the kids would say they noticed but I did. I didn't feel as connected to them as I have in years past. So this year I would like to say goal #1 is to develop better relationships.

Beyond that this summer was really transformative for my department, we broke through some barriers and really started collaborating and working together to push each other to higher levels. We have been developing a more student centered two year curriculum (we only teach 7th & 8th grade in my building) and we were able to have some very hard discussions on why we are teaching what we are teaching. A part of that was also having many of us in the department do some book studies over the summer, the two highlights being Book Whisperer by Donallyn Miller and Read, Write, Teach by Linda Rief. Do to these two books the entire school is participating in the 40 book challenge, including teachers! It is through this 40 book challenge that I have already seen better relationships develop with my students through our book discussions. So my second and third goal of the year relate to both topics discussed in this paragraph: #2 continue to work on collaborating as a department, and #3 maintain the current momentum with the 40 book challenge.

In addition to goals #2 & #3, I am looking to help the entire school- not just myself. With our 1:1 iPad program we are collecting data and trying to prove that this new technology works when combined with proper rigorous teaching practices. Unfortunately we saw a dip in our scores last year for our state tests. I would like to add that the #4 goal is that we see an overall improvement on our scores school wide for reading and writing. Now I know a lot of people would say, what? I thought you were a good teacher, good teachers know that test scores aren't everything and you are right. BUT... Without teaching to the test I believe we are doing things school wide that should show an increase in test results, even with the switch to common core and the new SBAC tests. We are, with the 40 book challenge providing more time for reading in class, we have a reading intervention happening in half of our advisory classrooms, we are collaborating more with both social studies and science classrooms on writing and have established expectations across the board for small written responses (similar to what they will be asked to do on the new SBAC tests). So I am confident that without "teaching to the test" we will see better results this year.

And finally, last year I really prided myself on the idea that I was a paperless classroom however, I know now that there needs to be a fine balance between paper and digital content. Note taking and rough draft writing I think can benefit from paper. So this year I have asked my students to keep a spiral once again, for their notes on the flipped classroom and for their writing process- rough drafts specifically. Everything else is digital. I am finding that by setting up the expectation early with bring your spiral and book to class everyday the students are responding. So final goal #5 is to find a better balance between paper and digital content for the betterment of the student workflow process.

Goals for 2014-2015 School Year:

1. Develop better student relationships.
2. Better collaboration in my own department.
3. Maintain a positive momentum with the 40 book teacher challenge.
4. School wide improvement on reading and writing scores.
5.  Find a better balance between paper and digital content to reduce stress on students.

Ok! This post got long, so I will stop now. I think I will like this challenge. Side note, I am also hoping that this will get me blogging on a more consistent basis. Only time will tell!

For more on the 30-Day Blogging Challenge click here!
Another friend and fellow tech coach that is also participating!