As I have started to settle in my position after two years and finish up my master's degree, there are three areas that I would like to focus on when thinking about continuing my professional journey. Three areas that I would like to continue pursuing when thinking about moving forward in my professional journey are work with Cultures of Thinking, diving into writing workshop, and becoming a technology leader in my school.

 

This year I started in on our school team focusing on Cultures of Thinking. This focuses on more of the process of thinking rather than just the answer. There are many resources that have been created and routines that help beginning teachers as they work on the process of the student thinking. While skeptical at first, I really enjoy the forces that are focused on. In my classroom this year, I have been able to work on classroom environment and plan on working on the other seven forces. These have given me new drive in working through each one and encouraging others at our school to do so. As mentioned above, starting to implement these in my classroom has been a point of discussion and an example for other teacher to see the forces in use. I have started to become an active member and would like to become a leader of this in our school.

 

My mentor has really great ideas and is really interested and knowledgeable about writing workshop methods. I have basic knowledge from the elementary levels, but I would like to attend workshops and conferences to see how this is applicable in a realistic way at the middle school grade level. I have been working on the process of writing from rough draft to conferencing to final drafts. Writing is a challenging area to teach and I want students to learn to write and practice authentically. Once they learn the process and begin to write more authentically, I believe they will grow in their confidence and enjoyment of writing. I have started looking conferences and workshops to see what would be available and am going to push to have members of our department attend one next year.

 

Another important area that I am striving for is to be one of our technology leaders in the school. In our school, we have iPads for all of our students, which have great benefits. Since they are rather new, we have run into quite a few issues with various apps and networking issues. It is a struggle to keep students on task with other apps easily available and some teachers have been hesitant to use them for those reasons. I would like to be a technology leader and be willing to try out new apps (like using OneNote, OneDrive, or new apps I have not hear of!) and find different ways to use the iPads. I am willing to crash and burn and learn to improve next time if it betters my students’ learning. I feel like we have so many potential resources are available through these that would motivate, engage, and show significant growth in learning. It would be great to attend conferences or even attend a technology conference or have a professional visit our school for our specific needs!

 

I would then love to take that technology knowledge and apply it to literacy. Currently, we use the iPads to make vocabulary quiz card (Quizlet), they can access the public library e-Books, can take comprehension tests, and do inquiry research. However, there are so many options and ways to integrate literacy into different subject areas, but I feel like we have only found the basic ways to use it with literacy. Finding out the most effective ways and putting those into practice is very exciting to me!

 

While I am passionate about these three areas of study in my future, I really love my school, teachers, and students. I would love to get involved in not only the school and community, but also the education world. From what I have gathered looking at teaching over the years, it is ever changing and growing. While some things come back into practice, there are new pieces added to it to make it fresh and updated. I want to continue to be on the cutting edge of my career and subject area in order to best service my students. After all, although we are teachers, we are also always going to be students.