Long and Short-Term Teaching Goals
I believe self-reflection is very important for improving both my experience as a teacher and opportunities for student learning. These written goals will help me to evaluate my growth as an educator throughout the school year and will help refocus and refresh my teaching.
The following long-term teaching goals are aspects of teaching that I hope to develop and maintain throughout my teaching career. When I think of my own teachers I had in the past, these are qualities that I believe made them effective in creating lasting change on how I viewed the world and myself as a learner. I may not remember every fact I learned in their class, but I remember the passion they shared about their subject or the enthusiasm with which they encouraged me to dive into a topic and find meaning and ways to apply the material to my daily life. These goals also align with my philosophy of teaching and with the best, research-based practices I have learned and hope to apply consistently in my teaching.
- Create and maintain a safe and supportive learning environment which accepts and validates each person's voice and which encourages intellectual risk-taking
- Awaken a lifelong love of learning and support students in academic and extra-curricular pursuits with opportunities to learn in ways that are meaningful, motivating, involving, challenging, enriching, and rewarding
- Connect learning to students' lives and empowering students as citizens in the larger community to make changes
- Invite students to participate in class meetings and develop consensus decision-making skills in a way that encourages critical thinking, perspective, community building, citizenship, and empathy
- Have high expectations for all students and allow for differentiation by honoring different learning styles, planning defined outcomes, designing flexible grouping, and providing ongoing assessment
- Praise individual accomplishments and create many opportunities for formative assessments and meaningful feedback
- Facilitate student-centered, active learning which develops critical, creative, and reflective thinking
- Place a high value on students' identities (culture, race, language, gender, and experiences, among others) as a foundation for learning
- Become involved in the full learning community and view parents and other members of the community as partners in education
- Be resilient, responsive to student needs and sudden changes, eager to experiment, and persistently committed to students
- Continue to learn and reflect on my own teaching by documenting progress, reviewing daily challenges, collaborating with other faculty members, and actively studying current models of learning and best practices
- Facilitate cooperative learning to encourage collaboration and respectful interactions
The short-term teaching goals listed below are specific classroom or professional development goals I hope to achieve in my first year teaching. Many of these goals I developed from reading over and summarizing the feedback I received from my cooperating teachers and supervisors during my field placements as a pre-service teacher and from my personal reflections. Some are aspects of my teaching I improved greatly from the start to the end of my placements and which I don't want to forget to remind myself to continue over the year. Others are specific responsibilities an tasks I did not have many opportunities to try and tackle as a student teacher and which I am looking forward to working on again.
- Take the Praxis II tests and obtain teaching certifications for chemistry, earth science, and spanish in addition to my secondary biology/life science certification I hope to obtain in May
- Keeping in touch with my university and regularly sharing first year experiences with upcoming teachers
- Update my course blog or create and active blog documenting my teaching experiences and encouraging feedback from others in the profession
- Creating opportunities for positive interactions with parents including newsletters, individual postcards, and meetings
- Immediately recording adjustments to lesson plans and organizing class activities to share and use as a resource for future years
- Meeting with colleagues on a regular basis to share notes, get ideas, and gather feedback
- Maintaining documentation of whole-group and individual student performance through formal and informal assessments linked to learning goals, keeping samples of student work and surveys, and learning how to use online tools for benchmark assessment that provide immediate data to inform instruction
- Continually encourage and move students towards higher level thinking activities that help to develop deeper understanding
- Engage all students in meaningful discussion throughout the course of my lessons through prompted questions and opportunities for interaction and experimentation
In addition to these goals, I have many dreams for the future both in and outside the classroom. As a teacher, I hope to someday obtain a masters degree in science, apply for my National Board Certification, and teach abroad for some portion of my career. After working with the Alliance to Save Energy's Green Schools program, I also dream about starting a program that would allow schools to construct green, edible roofs where students could be entrusted to tend to the roofs, and, in the process learn about engineering, vertical farming, sustainability, and community development. These dreams will likely change as I find my niche in the world over the next few years and I know I may want to start by taking on an online professional development class and seeing if I can borrow a bit of earth for smaller gardening projects with students. At this moment, the dream I look forward to most is immersing myself in a positive, supportive work environment, gaining experience working with and learning from students, and finding ways that I can best support this learning community.
