Upon entering the Master of Arts program through Michigan State University, my goals were (and still are) largely tied to improving my craft to meet the diverse needs of my students. After my first year of teaching middle school ELA, I knew that I wanted to work on differentiating my instruction with specific practices that would not only help my students reach their literacy goals, but also help me learn what works for future years to come in developing literacy instruction that paves the way in creating life long readers.
As a fourth year teacher in my professional career, I can say that some of my goals have stayed the same, but that I've also added new professional goals as my life has changed over time. As I write this, I am expecting a baby in November of 2021 and this experience and life changing gift has made me want to strive for more in my teaching career to give my son the best life possible. I have never felt so motivated to create a career that I'm proud of, while also helping and shaping many students along the way in not only their literacy goals but also in finding who they are as individuals and growing because of it. My professional goals, as I've learned more about differentiating my instruction and feeling like I'm making a difference in the literacy learning experiences of my students, now have a lot to do with molding students who work on their character growth goals in addition to their academic literacy goals. My school is currently doing a character growth project as part of our day-to-day learning experiences, where we look at our character strengths and work on skills like leadership, teamwork, curiousity, empathy, etc. This is the most profound way that my professional goals have changed, where literacy is still my passion in helping students strive to become life long readers and learners, but I also put more emphasis in my classroom structure on being a good person, and working on our character as individuals to become productive members of our society as a whole.
Overall, my professional goals have been added to as I've developed as a teacher and I have had more opportunities to see not only what students need but also how students can become the best version of themselves. Literacy goals (fluency, comprehension, reading strategies, workshops, etc.) will always be at the core of what I do in the ELA classroom, but I think it is vastly important as an educator to put emphasis on the whole student. This program will help me, and already has helped shape me, in coming up with creative solutions for my students in addition to providing me with excellent tools to take on many of the unknowns that are thrown at a teacher in their career. Looking at a student's life outside of the classroom and helping students think about who and what they want to be when they grow up tie into the "why?" of students feeling motivated in the classroom, and I feel as though this program has taught Master of Arts in Education students how to reach each student and develop a plan to create engagement and joy for learning within that student. Therefore, my professional goals have become centered around the ideology that all students can succeed when their literacy goals in ELA are tied to their goals as growing individuals and their future hopes and dreams. This program has paved the way for this ideology to come to fruition and I could not be more grateful.
Goals for Growth & Gain
As I progress in my career goals in the world of education, I find myself thinking about how I want to best serve my students and school community with future goal planning. As a literacy teacher, currently in an 8th grade ELA classroom environment, My goals are heavily tied to how to best promote literacy instruction and growth within my students’ by finding helpful resources and activities that promote this growth in and outside of the walls of my classroom. As I will be entering into my 5th year of teaching next Fall, where I could potentially have an intern of my own (so exciting!), there are goals that I would like to accomplish including how to best incorporate the 40 Book Challenge into my classroom, developing my usage skills surrounding the literacy site of Newsela, as well as having more concrete connections of literacy in the classroom to students’ lives outside of the classroom through meaningful, valuable activities that students feel tied to when it comes to their future aspirations and what drives them.
In looking more closely at my first goal, I would like to hone in the craft of the 40 Book Challenge in a way that is more seamless and accessible to all students. This year, I decided to finally incorporate the 40 Book Challenge into my classroom after feeling too new and overwhelmed to do it the last three years of running my classroom at the 8th grade level. Since I am new to the routine, there have already been issues and changes that have altered the structure of how the 40 Book Challenge is run due to figuring out the “kinks” along the way. I let students know in the beginning of the school year that it wouldn’t be perfect and that we would “edit and revise” the challenge as the year progressed and issues arose that needed to be addressed. We have already incorporated a change in genre variety to be eligible for the 40 Book Challenge, as well as looking at more specific requirements tied to students’ GoodReads reviews that they must write after each novel they complete, to be submitted to our 40 Book Challenge class raffle, and classroom posters displaying our books read for each hour and student. I want to learn how to best run this literacy incentive program in my classroom this year, and come into next school year with a smoother approach to introducing this to students. A great resource to help me with these skills, and to teach others about this challenge and benefits of incorporating this into more literacy classrooms, can be found here, giving a personal account of a teacher’s positive experience and student gain from running this program.
Additionally, another goal I have in my career for future planning and progress is surrounding the world of Newsela which is a great platform encouraging students’ growth in grammar, punctuation, reading and writing skills, etc. This year especially, the district is providing more concrete professional development opportunities for the world of Newsela and how to have it meet the needs of not only diverse learners, but all classroom literacy learners. After a few lessons, the website is able to tailor student data to student learning and create activities (naturally differentiate) literacy lessons from student to student. While all of this sounds amazing, it has been a learning curve for me to make the most of this educational opportunity to meet the needs of my students but also other district curriculum. A concrete goal that I have for Newsela is not only to better understand its uses and benefits for my classroom by taking further training on the platform, but also to have a set Newsela routine in my classroom so that it is more clear and expectations are set of when Newsela will be accessed by students, vs. when we are doing district curriculum. Other teachers, and myself, fear that daily Newsela or even weekly Newsela routine(s) will not provide enough classroom time to get through our yearly units. Finding this balance will be essential to best serving literacy students not only in my classroom, but across the district. One aspect that will be particularly helpful in meeting a portion of this goal, can be found here, where I (anyone) can actually become a certified Newsela instructor/learn the ropes of the platform as a whole.
Lastly, I have the important task of making more meaningful connections from the given curriculum to student interests and motivations. This is the goal that is the most important to me as I continue not only this school year, but since I am also planning on teaching the district-provided units for years to come as there is not currently a plan in place to critique and better craft these units as a team/district. I really believe in the authenticity of the units as a whole, and think they provide students with great learning opportunities and goals, however, I think they need to be more closely aligned with student interests and motivations. For example, in our Book Critique assignment that we are currently working on, it feels “outdated” and very “inside the lines/box” to be writing a formal essay and evaluation on a book that students have read so far this school year during our choice reading unit. I would like to look at unit outcomes like this, and provide student choice in our units in a way that is more meaningful to students. For example, maybe students write about what they learned and enjoyed from their novel, but also have the opportunity to create a Tik Tok sharing their review in a creative way that could also reach a wider audience? Or, maybe students reenact a scene from their novel that shows that novel’s chosen theme from the reader’s perspective? These are the student opportunities that I want to make more prevalent in my classroom so that learning experiences stay with my students and help them learn in a way that suits their specific learning style. This is going to take a lot of thinking, and hopefully collaboration with my building team, but in also using this resource and similar links/sites, I think it can be done and students will be better off because of it through engaging in more “outside of the box” culminating activities.
Overall, these goals outline the work I would like to accomplish in my professional career in the foreseeable future. I think that the combination of honing my skills with the 40 Book Challenge will set my students up for success to have higher reading motivation throughout the school year. Additionally, using Newsela to best serve my students and learning how to incorporate this platform into our weekly routine will give students naturally differentiated learning experiences to pave the way for literacy growth in the scope of any given school year. Lastly, looking deeper into district provided curriculum and how to best craft these lessons and units to student motivations and interests in their own lives, will help create success and enjoyment in the classroom, because students who love learning and how they are learning content are more likely to remember the content for years to come.