Okay, I promised myself that I wouldn’t write about Twilight anymore since I was so ashamed by the size of Stephenie Meyer’s name in my tag cloud. Still, I just had to share this.
Take that Edward Cullen!
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Monthly Archives: June 2009
Priorities
I’ve learned so much this year that it’s tempting to throw myself into every initiative that comes across my desk and to want to change everything about my teaching all at once.
It’s tempting.
It’s also INSANE!
So I’ve decided to set some priorities for next year, and I’m following the model that my friend Kevin shared with me, that he learned from a speaker in his Master’s class. This person held up one hand and said that he was so busy he decided that he would have five priorities (Get it? Five fingers? Five priorities. I guess you only get to have six priorities if you’re the bad guy who killed Inigo Montoya’s father, in which case you’re going to die anyway so…) not just for work, but for your life. If something doesn’t fit one of those priorities you have to say no. Easier said than done, but I’ll give it a try. I just need to figure out what my priorities are.
Well first of all, it seems important to me to make sure that my relationships with my family and friends should be at the top of my priority list.
Then health. That can be physical, mental, and spiritual.
Yikes! That only leaves three left for professional priorities!
All right, well we all know that I want to find ways to bring more web 2.0 into the classroom even if I don’t have a beautiful shiny wifi Apple-sponsored computer lab (But seriously, that would be amazing).
Two left!
Assessment and Evaluation: No big surprise there. I want to continue to refine my understanding of good assessment and evaluation practices and how to bring together the ideal and the reality in order to support students. I like this one because it encompasses a lot of other things that I’m passionate about.
One left! Well people keep asking me what my ultimate goal is in this profession. Do I want to go into admin? Do I want to go back to the board office? Do I want to go to grad school? For now, I’ve decided that my ultimate goal is to be a really really good teacher. To some people that may not sound like a terribly ambitious goal, but it is to me. I think it’s easy to become complacent in this profession. I think that you have to keep pushing yourself to get better and to continue to see yourself as a learner. I never want to have the attitude that “I’ve been doing this for 20 years; there’s nothing new anyone can tell me about teaching.” So my fifth priority is to view myself as a professional learner. That may sound a bit too vague but I know what it means.
So that’s it for now. I may come back and revise these later. Do you have any priorities or goals for next year?
Adventures in Podcasting
We are going to be starting a monthly podcast in Thames Valley and here’s my contribution! It’s on using Twitter to build a PLN and it’s definitely geared at newbies.
Metacognition
Well it’s been one heck of a year and a very steep learning curve. I hope I’ve been able to make some impact on teacher practice and student learning. I think back to this time last year when I was so apprehensive about becoming a learning coordinator and wondering if I’d made a mistake. I really liked being in the classroom. What was I doing?
This time last year, there was only one thing I knew about teaching. I liked the kids. Not all the time. Not every day. But overall, I really liked the interaction with my students and getting the feeling that in some small way I’d made some kind of difference for at least one or two of them.
But there wasn’t anything about teaching that I could say I was really passionate about. I wanted to do an action research project but I had no idea what my topic would be.
The best thing about this year is that it opened my eyes to so many things about which I am now passionate. As I go back and read my posts (or as @R_O_Y_A_N calls them, “rants”), I realize that without this year, I would have never discovered that I find adolescent literacy fascinating and that I think I now know how I could have helped those poor kids in my Work Internship class two years ago (sorry guys!). I would have never reconsidered my old ideas about assessment and evaluation. I wouldn’t have believed that differentiated instruction was really practical or necessary and don’t even get me started about technology!
In the past, I feel that I knew all the right things to say, but I didn’t have the passion or interest to stand behind those things and now I do! I decided back in December that as great as this opportunity was, I belong in the classroom. Down the road, I might consider applying for a job like this again, but I really feel like I need to get some more experience under my belt before I can do a great job supporting other teachers. I’m about to join the English department at a new school (having only ever taught in one school!) with a year of incredibly rich professional development behind me and a PLN I never had just a year ago. I really hope I’m able to apply everything I’ve learned to this new job placement. But I also hope I’m able to give myself permission to not try to change everything at once and drive everyone around me crazy in the process!
I am a Nerd
I prefer the term “geek” but in this case I am a nerd. At least I’m in good company. Thanks to my pal and colleague Heather, I got to go to the lovely town of Glencoe this past Friday and see assessment guru Damian Cooper.
Damian Cooper is so passionate about the topic of Assessment for Learning that he literally bounces around the room while he’s talking. I for one particularly appreciate the fact that he comes from a secondary English background and that he’s not so far removed from the classroom that he doesn’t understand the all of the “in the trenches” realities that teachers deal with on a daily basis. He also doesn’t shy away from difficult questions. I found myself hanging on his every word.
He identified what is for me one of the biggest struggles with the assessment in Ontario: the ministry says it supports the idea of assessment for learning, but its policies and procedures don’t provide the support teachers need to implement these ideas. If we really believe that work habits such as punctuality, attendance, etc. are important, then they need to have some weight behind them. Learning skills need to show up on transcripts–otherwise they have no teeth. If a student can’t be given an academic penalty for not submitting an assignment or not submitting it on time, then there needs to be an appropriate behavioural consequence–again, something with teeth.
The part that I’m still not entirely clear on is this issue of deadlines. I understand that some students need more time than others to complete assignments. But I also understand that if I’m told I can hand something in between October 1st and October 15th, I’m going to wait until October 15th, even though I’m intrisically motivated and understand the importance of receiving teacher feedback in order to improve. I’m okay with not deducting marks for late work, but I still think there needs to be a real perceived penalty in place for not meeting a deadline, and I think that as long as students are required to complete a credit within a specific time frame and as long as teachers are required to submit “marks” at regular intervals, we need to keep deadlines. I also think teachers need the flexibility to extend deadlines or provide individual extensions depending on the circumstances of the student. I hope Mr. Cooper wouldn’t disagree with that. I’m very tempted to email him and ask.
I would also like to ask him some more specific questions about designing down and the Ontario curriculum for secondary English. Specifically, I’d like to know what he considers the Big Ideas to be for specific courses. As I’ve probably said before, it seems much easier to come up with a Big Idea for a subject like history than it does for English.
And yes, I did get him to sign my book, but so did Heather. So there.
