Friday, August 21, 2015
Goals: Not the Basketball or Football Kind
Yesterday my MT had her students define and set goals for themselves. She introduced the concept by asking them what a goal was: "What is a goal?" she asked. "And not the basketball or football kind." While my students are setting goals in the beginning of this year, I thought I should set some for myself as well. This year I want to get more comfortable teaching lessons that I design and plan for my students. I have substitute taught for the last two years, so I feel pretty good about being in front of students, but I'm not quite as confident teaching my own ideas. I'm excited to start doing that! Designing lesson plans seems like a daunting task right now, but I hope to get good at it! Designing meaningful instruction that my students are interested in is one of my long-term goals for this year. Some short term goals that I have are to learn all of my students' names, and something they like or like to do. I'm developing some goals for myself and certain students, like how to engage them and keep them interested in class. The class I am in most often right now is quite chatty. They talk to each other, my MT, me, and sometimes to themselves. Developing a classroom management plan that I can implement while I'm teaching is another one of my short-term goals. Keeping and managing that plan is one of my long-term goals. I'll keep you updated while these goals develop and change as I get to know my students!
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Aleisha,
ReplyDeleteI can definitely relate to existing and assisting in a classroom being different than teaching your own ideas. To me this is like my writing process. I can write on my own just fine but giving my work to someone else to read is almost painful. A piece of your mind (figuratively) and a good chunk of your soul (literally?) is in that composition. However, the only way to get better is to get that second opinion or another person to edit your work. I think that is a struggle most of us are familiar with and I think there is a little part of this struggle or fear that makes us better as professionals. While one day we may be less hesitant to do this, having that fear pushes us now to make sure we are giving the best information we can provide to our students. That fear also asks us to be reflective in our teaching (all good things!).
I am very interested in reading about your future encounters with individual students and how you are going to get them motivated. I taken notice of a few of these students myself and keep trying to brainstorm ways to get them engaged in the classroom. I think a good way to start this would be to find out their interests, as you have already mentioned, and try to incorporate that into one of your lessons. As to where to go from there? Well, I'm sure we'll figure that out together along the way.
Here's to a wonderful start to the semester! Keep going strong!
Miss Bryan, thanks for sharing your short- and long-term goals with us! I particularly appreciate your goals that consider how you can engage particular students and the whole-class. This shows me that you're going to be a teacher who's consistently striving for improvement, while also analyzing what's working and what's not working in her classroom. Have you ever heard of action research or teacher research? Here's a link: http://www.nea.org/tools/17289.htm. It sounds like this is what you're going to do in your classroom. And I'm all for it!
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