30-Day Blogging Challenge: Day 1: My Goals

A principal who I really admire and who had a huge impact on my summer through his #SummerLS challenge and EduAllStars podcast (but I've yet to meet in person), Todd Nesloney, tweeted out a link to a 30-day blogging challenge. Despite the fact that I have an alphabetical list of at least 30 posts I'd like to write, I feel like this would be a good way to keep me on track. Plus, once I write one post, I'm always inspired to write another.

Reflective Teaching: A 30-Day Blogging Challenge for Teachers

Day 1:
Write your goals for the school year. Be as specific or abstract as you'd like to be.

I'm going to have to be specific. I have a LOT of goals and have spent a lot of time this summer reflecting on what they are. For ease of organizing my thoughts, I've split them into sections: Values in my Grade 3/4 Classroom (goals for my students and I); Professional Goals (things I'm going to work on as a teacher)

Values in my Grade 3/4 Classroom - EPCOT

Be Brave
Overall, my goal for the school year (for myself and my students) is "Be Brave". Day 1 in the classroom (tomorrow!), that will be our only expectation. As we form as a team, my students and I will work together to co-create roles, responsibilities and expectations.

I ADD EGGS
Last year, my grade 5/6 Rainbow Eggheads and I lived by the recipe for success: ADD EGGS. Initially, I created this recipe, but my students completely bought into it and owned it. They could reflect effectively on their choices, the choices of others and how to improve by using the language in ADD EGGS.

Last summer, I wrote a list of qualities I want to help develop in my students, qualities I'd like them to leave my classroom understanding and practicing every day. I came up with ADD EGGS - accountability, dynamism, drive, engagement, grateful, generous and supportive.
The Rainbow Eggheads lived these values last year. They could rhyme of the acronym easily and came up with "The Rainbow Rule" ("Be an ADD EGG, not a BAD EGG" - they even decided what BAD stood for)! In their end of year Ignite presentations, most of them referred to ADD EGGS and what a difference it made to their learning.

After lots of reflection (and discussion with my trusted colleague, Tiiu), I've decided to KISS (Keep It Simple, Silly) and share ADD EGGS with my incoming class. However, there is one quality that is missing from ADD EGGS, so this year, the acronym is changed to "I ADD EGGS" (I've added innovation to fit with another big class goal this year).

Imagineering and Blue Sky Thinking
Throughout my life, I've been inspired by Walt Disney, and lately, I've been reading a lot about his life, his innovations and his legacy. I can't help but think about how well his philosophies and his message tie into my dream classroom and teaching methods.

This year, my students and I will use Walt Disney (the person, not the brand) as a model. The way he, among other things: listened to all ideas while seeking the best way to do things; looked towards the future; learned from and embraced the past; told stories; thought about creating memorable and educational experiences; questioned everything and was open to change, will be essential to the way I think about teaching this year.

I will encourage my students to embrace Blue Sky Thinking by thinking big, following their dreams and believing in themselves.

We will think of ourselves as Imagineers as we use imagination to engineer our learning.

EPCOT
Because of my interest in all things Disney, I am inspired by Walt's vision for EPCOT (an experimental city, that, after his death, was repurposed as a theme park - my favourite as a child!). It breaks my heart that his vision never saw the light of day, but, learning from his passion and purpose, I thought about what I think a classroom should be.

I think a classroom should be a place where everyone can try new things, share successes with others and embrace change. Teachers should be futurists as we are preparing our students for a future we can't possibly predict. With that in mind, I've called my new class blog and twitter account EPCOTclass. In this case, EPCOT stands for Experimental Prototype CLASSROOM of Tomorrow. The name and vision will help to keep me on track with all of the ideas, values and dreams listed above.

Goals for my BEd Students

Bringing Language to Life for Life
I'm thrilled (and nervous!) to be teaching my first BEd class (Language Instruction in the Primary and Junior Years) this term. I have outlined goals for my students and I as "Big Ideas" in our week 1 slideshow. What I am really aiming to do is ignite (or kindle!) a passion for teaching (Language in particular) in the pre-service teachers who I will have the pleasure of working with.

I've subtitled my course "Bringing Language to Life for Life" and look forward to working with the students in class, on Twitter and through blogs to do exactly that, bring Language to life.

I want my students to leave my class better prepared for and more confident to teach Language to students of all ages. Because of that goal, I have worked very hard to create a comprehensive course and ensure that all assignments are authentic and applicable to the classroom.

Professional Goals

Balance and Wellness
This year, our admin is committed to helping staff find balance in our lives and ensure our wellness. I'm excited to see what this looks like.

Over the summer, I've tried to work on balance, something that has always been a challenge for me. In order to really understand what it looks like, I've created a list of my roles and set goals for the amount of time to spend on each during a day. Since late July, I've been tracking those. It's been enlightening for me to see how my goals align with what I actually do. Also, I see that I only have 24 hours in a day and have to set priorities, one of which is myself as a worthwhile human being. I'm going to work hard to remember that during the year. I will make it a priority to do happy-making things. I'll even work hard to make sure that some of those have nothing to do with my job!

Ongoing Feedback Communicated to Students and Families
In the survey I shared with Room 209 families last year, parents told me to learn to say no (they recognized that I tried to do too much!) and that they'd like to get more ongoing feedback about their children.

Tiiu and I created an Annual Learning Plan for students, which will be a working document that is shared with students and families (an individual one for each student) and developed throughout the year. The link I shared is absolutely a work in progress and I am planning to meet with each family early in the year to set goals and make plans.

Developing my PLN
People call it different things, but I think of my PLN as my Professional Learning Network and I am lucky to include lots of people I know in real life and online in it. I love to collaborate with other educators to bring interesting experiences into my classroom. I will continue to do this through twitter chats, planning and collaborating via Skype and the Google Drive.

An element I am adding this year is to work with inspirational, passionate educators in formal and informal settings. I have started an Educational Think Tank (with Amy Bowker) and the Comment Consortium. Because of getting to work regularly with amazing people, I know will continue to be challenged and pushed me.

Sharing My Learning
I'll be presenting at some upcoming conferences this fall and love to share what I have learned and what I am passionate about with other educators.

By committing to the Comment Consortium and this 30-day blogging challenge, I will regularly share my process with others. More importantly though, I will actually be creating instead of just consuming and I will really take the time to reflect on my practice.

Alternative Education
I teach at an alternative public school and we operate based on a series of tenets that make us different from other sites. A group of us met regularly last year and discussed our school philosophy to celebrate our successes and build upon them for the future.

The idea for Tree Families was born from this collaboration. Each staff member and student in the school will be placed in a "Family" represented by an Ontario tree for their entire time at our school. Families will meet regularly to work together on character education, anti-bullying initiatives and develop skills. We are starting Tree Families next week and I look forward to seeing how they help to build a real sense of ownership and community in our school.

Overall Goal

You Matter
After listening to and reading Angela Maiers this summer, i am thinking in terms of her movement, "You Matter". All of my other goals can be boiled down into this one. Each of us is a genius and it is our duty to share that genius with the world.

By reframing my thinking and remembering that I am significant, I can meet my professional (and personal goals) and let go of issues in a non-judgemental way, using them to move forward and make life better for myself and others. To remind all my students that they matter and help them find their passions and "follow their heartbreaks", I can help them achieve their goals.


It's a good thing this prompt encouraged me to be as specific as I like! As always, I had a lot to say!

Thanks to those of you who got all the way to the end of the post.

What are your goals for this school year? How are you committed to meeting them? What small and large actions are you taking to achieve them?

Legally Prohibited from Being Spontaneous in University

Next week at this time, I will have had two first days of school. I will, of course, be returning to my classroom with my brand new grade 3/4s. I will also be starting a brand brand new adventure - teaching in the Bachelor of Education program at the University of Ottawa.

I have been "partially seconded" (a term that many on campus at the U of O have told me is only used by BEd profs) to the University of Ottawa for a single Bachelor of Education course this fall. I will be teaching a class of 35-40 pre-service teachers in their Language Instruction course. 

Many summer moments were spent collecting resources, reflecting on my own experiences in teachers' college and (attempting) to crowd source information! I love connecting with local and international educators on Twitter, and sent the survey below to people that I know in real and digital life. (If you're reading this post and want to fill it out, please feel free!)

I got some great tips and feedback, which I, of course, made into a slideshow (I'm kind of into slideshows right now, in case you didn't know).


Now, I'm down to the wire. Monday was spent in a faculty meeting with the new Director and Assistant Director of the program and my new colleagues. Because of the big change over, there were lots of details to be worked out.

I returned to campus on Tuesday after spending some time getting my grade 3/4 classroom ready. I got to explore a lot of buildings on campus to get my employee ID, find my university classroom (which is beyond amazing, by the way) and arranging for a key card. ALMOST all details are now taken care of. I'm still trying to access my class lists in InfoWeb and hope I'll be able to do that before meeting my students on Wednesday.

Before I explain the title of this post, I'll let you in on a few details. I feel like I'd love to teach BEd students, but when the opportunity for a partial secondment was posted in our school email conference, I hesitated. Luckily, I have fantastic, supportive, cheerleading colleagues. Two of them forwarded the information to me and told me to go for it. Caving to positive peer pressure, I did. At the very end of June, on one of my final days with the Rainbow Eggheads, I was shocked to get an email saying that I got a position. As a partially seconded professor, the school board releases me for 14 days in a term (September-December) to teach a single course to a single class of pre-service teachers. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to determine whether or not I really do love to teach BEd students, while still keeping my foot in an elementary classroom.

By Friday, all BEd professors have to submit a course outline, or syllabus, to the faculty. Each prof is then responsible for distributing a paper copy of this syllabus to all students in his or her class in their first lesson. I am a planning addict (and generally overplan by a factor of four, each year could be four times as long, I have enough planned!) and had a lot of fun writing lists of all the ideas I wanted to impart upon my BEd students. The tricky part came in narrowing down my ideas to 12 three and a half hour classes. The trickier part is, we were told in our faculty meeting that course syllabi are legally binding. They cannot be changed once the course has started (without a LOT of difficulty) and students could charge us if we do! Whoa. Just planning so specifically so far in advance (my class runs until December) feels like a bit of pressure. Knowing I'm married to those plans feels like a heck of a lot more.

I've tried my best to tie together my plans and look at the course as a narrative, moving from big ideas to more specific details in a logical way. You know when you've been working on something for a really long time and you can't even accurately judge it any longer? That's how I feel about my course outline.

Interested in being part of a BEd course? I'd love your help. Check out the course outline and let me know what you think. There is some detail in the document, but I have a lot more on supplementary documents (as well as the 12-14 slideshows I'll be sharing in the "listen" portions of the course). Please feel free to leave a comment here, tweet at me or comment on the doc itself. Also, consider filling out the survey at the top of this post to share your ideas.

On Wednesday, when I hand this document out, I'm married to it. If you have any suggestions or objections, speak now or forever hold your peace.

Peace out.

***Bonus points for anyone who recognized the blog title as a reference to Conan's 2010 comedy tour.***