Wow! I can’t believe we are at the end of the school year. These
past two years of teaching have been challenging yet rewarding. I’ve learned so
much about my kids, community, and myself. My celebrations over these years of
teaching is that I’ve learned the value of relationship building with my kids
and their families, strengthened my pedagogy and learned to facilitate my
students’ learning.
As I think ahead to my third year of teaching I am really
anticipating the next year (after a nice long summer break of course J .
I think it will be a relief to be able to just focus on teaching, my students
and their families. I will be able to take everything that I’ve learned in this
program and apply it to the remainder of my teaching career. Moving forward my
biggest takeaways from this program is that I want to build a strong sense of
community and represent classroom culture at the beginning of the school year.
I realize that most of the challenges I faced this year were behavior &
classroom management b/c of the lack of community we built at the beginning of
the year. I also want to be more goal oriented
for next year, I realized that my students and I never set real goals for our
class, there was not a discussion about where we wanted to be by the end of the
year. I believe if we had implemented this my students would have been a lot
more motivated to learn. Regardless of the grade I teach next year, I’m
definitely going to implement writer’s workshop J after seeing presentations of the writer’s workshop
in class and reading Pathways, I realize that no matter what age, students can produce
high quality writing work. Lastly, I really just want to make sure my students
and I have fun next year! On the first day of our Critical Pedagogy class, our
professor immediately set the tone that we were going to enjoy this class and
engage with one another, that’s the sort of precedent that I want to set for my
kids and our class next year.
All of the work we have done this year has been rewarding,
but the most personal for me has been our evolving position statement. I think about
how my position statement has changed so much over the past two years and what
I value as a teacher. As I continue with teaching my goal will be to make sure
I’m living up to my beliefs about teaching and learning and I’m always doing
what’s best for my students.
Lastly, I have really enjoyed this program and all of you! It’s
been so rewarding how well we have been able to work together and support each
other over the past couple of years. I think about how we were all slowly
getting to know each other on the first day of class last year, to our first
awkward DRC (lol) to now representing our work and growth and completing this
process together. I look forward to walking across the stage with you all and
celebrating all we have accomplished these last couple of years. I know as we
move on from here to take whatever path we decide after graduation we will
continue to stay in touch and support one another through it all J
LOVE YOU LADIES!!!
