We have made it!!

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!!!