I think where my school is at, and where I am at, are probably different, although being in a productive, collaborative, and supportive environment has certainly brought me up! In general, I am vacillating between forming and norming, without much storming. There is definitely storming in my classroom, but as far as the staff team goes there is a strong sense of performing, with some occasional norming. Specifically, at the beginning of the year, we conducted a large amount of norming protocols. Since then collaborative work has been fast-paced and efficient, without losing a sense of community and human connectedness.
My place in this is to go along for the ride. I am absolutely contributing to the projects of which I am a part, but as far as altering staff team culture, I do not see it as my place, yet, or as a necessity. I feel incredibly fortunate to have been brought on board with such an incredible group of teachers, all of whom are both professional and friendly, and help to lift me up and show me the way. I am curious to see how the year closes up in six months, as this seems like a strange transition for teaching as a profession. Where you say goodbye for the summer and then rejoin in the fall. However, I have been a part of seasonal employment for so long that I relish the fluctuations of collaboration throughout the different times of the year, as opposed to the repetitive, year-in, year-out nature of most jobs. Moving forward, I want to be more of a leader, as opposed to a follower. I do not feel confident in my practice yet, but I am becoming confident in my place in the school, and I do hold some esteem as an educator. I simply need to step up into these shoes and bring more of my thoughts and ideas to the table with confidence. Only time will really help with this, though, as I am still learning so much.
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One of my biggest struggles this semester (and there have been a lot) is in staying ahead of my planning. I would really like to be better planned out, and more explicitly. Often times I know exactly where a unit is going, and have reviewed the material so that I know the critical pieces and concepts, but then I get bogged down in the day to day teaching and lose sight of the bigger picture as I am trying to plan each individual lesson. I feel as though this leads to a loss of overarching cohesiveness in my units, where even though I am relatively explicit with my students about our main goals, I lose sight of them, and so they do too. This then leads to a lack of motivation because my students are not able to see either the bigger picture of the unit, or the steps we are taking to get to that end goal.
I am disappointed in myself over this, as I feel like I have the capacity to stay more ahead of the ball and be better about the long-term and daily planning. Although I do not think I am completely failing in this area, there is definitely a lot of growth that could be happening here for me. A large cause of this I think is the lack of time. It is possible for me to be able to do this if I were to neglect every other part of my life, which I am not willing to do. However, I am not very prepared with great oversight for NEXT year when I reteach these units. However, I still have two to three more units to teach, and I want to be very prepared for them. Especially my next unit which starts after winter break, as this is the one I am going to be using for my capstone project, and where I will be implementing all of my group work research. This means I need to have sections of the unit very purposefully sectioned off for my individual pieces of data collection, as well as for the sake of my students’ learning! Therefore, over winter break I plan on doing a lot of the bigger picture planning that I have not been able to yet so far this semester. This was my first time using Pear Deck, and I really like it. I wish it were free! If it were I would almost certainly start using it in my classroom, as it hits on most of the things I already do in my practice, but increases accountability, and I would hope that it would improve student engagement! |
Julian SpringerMath Department - Animas High School Archives
December 2019
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