Spring 2024 Semester Goals
Happy 2024! I love that 2024 started on a Monday – it was a new year, a new month, and a new week all at the same time. I believe the next time that this will happen is in 2029!
I hope your year is off to a great start and you are starting to get back into the routine from the break. It was a hard transition back to school and work routines. Since I am starting to approach the spring semester, I put together some goals that I have for my teaching. This spring, I am teaching and running the Literacy Clinic – which is a practicum class for the graduate students. My students, who are earning their Master’s Degrees and Literacy Certifications, need to complete a certain number of hours where they work with students who are in Pre-K through Grade 12. The Literacy Clinic gives them the opportunity to complete those hours. I supervise the Literacy Clinic – coaching the graduate students as they work with the kids and making sure everything is running properly. The other class I am teaching is a writing methods class. I love teaching both of these classes and really want to make the most of them for my students and for me. So here are some goals I put together. As you can see, I do not have tons of goals, that’s because I want to be sure to accomplish them – so I decided on a few to make sure I complete them.
Build Community
This is a big goal for me this year. This fall (more coming on this later this month), I had an experience where I had to rely on my community for support. Community is huge – in life and in the classroom. I want to make sure that I am building a community in my classes where the students can feel comfortable taking risks in their work and their teaching and feel that their peers and I will support them. Many of my former students contact each other for lesson ideas and support when they are going on job interviews – so making sure that the students have a connection to each other is a goal as well. How am I going to do this? I believe that you have to know one another in order to build a community – so building in moments and teaching opportunities for the students to share about themselves and their classrooms will help accomplish this goal. Graduate students tend to sit with the same group of students – so mixing up the groupings and getting the students to talk is something else that I can do. Conversation starters at the beginning of class is one activity that I will try, particularly at the beginning of the semester.
Celebrate Fun Moments and Minor Holidays
As an elementary school teacher, I was great at celebrating minor holidays. For example, when I taught fifth grade, I had fun with the students on Groundhog Day – something they said they had not done since first grade. It did not take a lot of time, but had a huge payoff and is something that they remembered after they left my classroom. I want to do the same thing in my teaching with graduate students. This year is a leap year – so, I’m already planning something fun to celebrate this minor holiday.
The spring semester is also a time when the students are looking for jobs and interviewing – so I plan to celebrate these moments with them as well. When I was working towards my doctorate, one of my professors was really adamant about celebrating every milestone that we hit in life – she said it’s easy to just move past these moments – and she is right. I want to make sure to celebrate these times with my students.
Bring in Lots of Different Texts
I’m running the Literacy Clinic this semester and I’m hearing from parents that their kids want to read books that they will enjoy. In the recent interviews that I have had with other educators and authors, each of them has discussed the power of choice in supporting students with their reading and in getting kids reading. Jennifer McCarty Plucker, who I spoke with in a December podcast, spoke about how she spent time exposing high school students to many different types of books so that they could learn what they enjoyed reading and see themselves as readers. My goal is to bring in many different texts this semester so that my students see their role in helping students find books that they want to read. This may mean moving beyond what they have been reading and finding new books for their students.
Give Feedback That Will Move Teaching Forward
I provide feedback on my students’ work, but I want to be mindful of the type of feedback I am giving. Last semester, I was teaching a theory class – so my feedback was on supporting and strengthening their writing. This spring, I am teaching methods classes – classes to support them as teachers, so my feedback should be aimed at moving their teaching forward and helping them become stronger reading and writing teachers. Therefore, when I am giving feedback – this will be my focus when looking at their work.
If you have goals for your teaching this spring, what are they? Feel free to send me an email and let me know what you are working on! I will check-in and review these to see how I am doing at the end of February!