January 9, 2021
My professional development goal (and the goal of this blog) is co-planning and I think this mantra will help me to achieve progress towards that goal. Goals within a goal, right?
I don’t really make a new year’s resolution, but I do try to focus on specific things, and the new year inspires me to reconsider things. As I tackle this blogging hobby, I am inspired to share my thoughts with you.
Patience:
Patience has never come easily to me. I get excited about things (I call this ‘getting passionate’ now :P). When I get passionate about things, I want others to be passionate with me. I have noticed that this has more of a steam-roller effect than the desired ‘co-passionate’ effect… lol.
I need to be patient while developing relationships with co-teachers, potential co-teachers, administrators, and fellow colleagues. We are all at different places (professionally, socially, emotionally), have different passions, and have different hopes and expectations. I have learned that putting the time and patience into the relationship now will have bigger and stronger benefits later. Later there will be more trust as we spend more time together collaborating (with (co-teaching)or without (co-planning) students).
Public education is a huge system and it usually takes some time for changes to take root. Patience, to me, means starting with small suggestions and working creatively wherever I can.
Perseverance:
I put ‘perseverance’ in my goal-within-a-goal because I need the reminder to keep trying. Either keep trying something new/ some new angle, or keep trying at a later date. I find that I can easily fall into the status quo and just go with the flow. I think I will do a future blog post about ‘enough’ not having to be a dirty word, but to me, ‘enough’ usually means that I am being complacent. I often feel like an adjunct so I need to remind myself to advocate for my profession and for language learners until we are a standard piece of the conversation. Education has a lot of pieces and each of us need to persevere in being a standard piece of the conversation among different passions, experiences, expectations, etc.
Productivity:
‘Productivity’ is in my goal-within-a-goal because I am beginning to get excited about the different ways that I can help and support classrooms (both students and teachers!). While my big goal is to sit down, with classroom teachers, and co-plan units (including the assessment piece of the unit), I recognize that it will take time, and patience ^_^, to get there. In the meantime, every little activity I bring along the way builds up relationships with the other teachers in my building. I can quickly create word clouds to sum up student thoughts during a brainstorming session and then print them off for students to use while writing. I can quickly create spelling games to help students have fun while preparing for weekly spelling tests. I can quickly create content games to review materials from socials/ science/ etc. units. I can quickly create graphics/ visuals/ word lists to support students while writing or participating in discussions. There is a lot of creative ‘micro- collaborating’ that I can do while I prepare to sit down and co-plan. 'Micro-collaborating'… new word… I like it- they are steps along the collaborative spectrum that I can celebrate!
-SherryTeacher
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