My Professional Growth Plan

Goal 1: Be more confident teaching a class by September 2009

In order for me to feel more confident teaching a class, I feel that I need more experience and I need to be able to be comfortable there. Some strategies to allow me to get more experience and develop confidence are:
1) Volunteer in a classroom
2) Take leadership roles in school groups
3) Do more presentations in front of larger groups
4) Take a leadership course

I have already begun this process. I have started to volunteer in a grade 6 classroom, where the teachers will allow me to teach the odd lesson. This will give me more experience. To develop my confidence, I have taken a leadership course through the UCL at the University of Calgary.

Goal 2: Integrate technology into more of my lessons by December 2009

To increase the amount of technology I use in lessons that I create, there are a few things that I need to do. I feel that I need to develop a deeper understanding of how to use technology, I need to know about how to obtain different types of technology, I need to feel more comfortable and confident in the different uses of technology to create meaningful learning experiences. Some strategies are:
1) Take a course about using technology in the classroom
2) Find resources about the different types of technology available for students and teachers
3) Find resources about new and updated technology
4) Take a course to further my knowledge about certain types of technology

I have started to develop my deeper understanding of technology and how to use it effectively as a meaningful learning tool. I have enrolled in the Technology SIPS course where we were told about many types of technology for a wide range of uses. One resource that I am glad to have is www.innovativelearning.com. This shows all types of assistive technology that is available to schools and teachers, and gives a description about what each type of technology is best used for. I also recently came across a magazine called Popular Science. This magazine contains information and articles about a wide variety of new and interesting types of technology and technological advances in many professions from medicine to athletics. There are many courses about technology through SAIT, Mount Royal, and other companies where I can deepen my understanding of the uses of applications such as PowerPoint, iMovie, iWeb, etc. I plan on taking a couple of these courses when I finish the MT program.

Goal 3: Keep a balance between my personal and professional lives by completing all school work by 7:00 pm on school nights by October 1, 2009, 6:00 by October 1, 2010 and 5:00 by October 1, 2011

This is going to be the most difficult thing for me to do because, as a beginning teacher, I will most likely be caught up in trying to plan for every possible thing that could occur in every lesson. I could spend countless hours developing lesson and unit plans and neglecting my family. To accomplish this task, I need to be cognizant of a few things when creating lesson and unit plans:
1) Keep them open-ended, yet structured to give students choice, and to limit the amount of home time I need to spend on the projects
2) Include peer and self assessments to aid me in assessing final projects or assignments
3) Inquiry takes a lot of meaningful planning in the beginning, but limits the amount of planning needed throughout the unit
4) Differentiation comes easier when I know each student’s strengths and weaknesses
5) Formative assessments are very helpful to the students and the teacher at that time as well as when it comes time for the summative assessment piece
6) The best way to make students responsible for their schoolwork is to let them be a player in the creation of their schoolwork. This will limit the amount of home time that I will need to spend on the creation of lessons, units, rubrics, etc.

This is going to be an ongoing battle, but I feel that if I keep all of these statements in mind during my teaching and “homework”, it will help me develop ways in which to accomplish these goals by the dates provided.

My IO Experience

What can I say? IO was a great tool for organizing everything a teacher would want to consider in creating a unit plan. It included more important things such as student engagement, and how you plan to integrate technology and what technology it is, what outcomes it meets and more importantly, it gives you a "Learn How" tab that lets you see if you are using technology usefully, efficiently, effectively and meaningful, or if you are using it just for the sake of including it to say you "covered" that part of the expectations. It provided a critical thinking element to the way we created our unit. I was constantly thinking about the quality of the tasks/activities, how I chose to integrate technology, how meaningful the task was, and how the task flowed with the rest of the unit. It was very helpful for me to see what the other tasks and activities were so I could build off them, include my own touches, and still meet the SLEs and GLEs. This is awesome, especially for beginner teachers because it has everything you would want to consider in a single page. You can quickly browse through your unit to make sure that it flows the way you wanted it to. My favorite part of creating the unit using IO is the online collaboration. As a creator, you can invite people to view or contribute to your unit, and they contribute in real time. It is like google docs for unit plans. I think it is an exceptional resource for teachers that require a little bit more help in the organization aspects of planning a unit (like me).

Enough of preaching IO. On to the juicy stuff. Our presentation of the unit went quite well. I have to admit, the suggestion of the invitation to participate in the Inventor's Workshop was great. It immediately drew the assessors into our unit, and they were excited to be able to be a part of it. If it worked this well with adults, it will for sure catch the attention of a wide range of students from the unmotivated to the "too cool for school" students. It is like the hand written, post office-mailed letter. Everybody gets excited when they get a letter addressed to them in the mail, and the students would really enjoy having a self addressed invitation to the unit plan. Also, it serves as a unit outline for the students. It lets them know what is next on their plate, and allows them to be engaged from step one.

The groups assessing our unit plan enjoyed the tasks and activities that we had planned out. They said that the activities would be engaging, enjoyable, and had an aspect of building, creating, imagination, and best of all, FUN! It was written in between the lines in the assessment, but I think that if the groups were asked explicitly if the students would have fun, they would say yes. If they were asked if the students would learn life skills from this, they would say yes, definitely. The feedback we got was not all positive, which is quite helpful. One comment that resonated with me was wether or not the reading and games in some of the websites for the Wheels and Levers task were age appropriate. This resonated with me because I was the one who created the activities for it. Thinking about the quality of the websites, I realized that a couple of them were geared toward older students, and a couple were for younger students. I was thinking that I would include them for the "lower" and "higher" students, but this comment made me rethink my extensions and modifications. The fact was, they were working in groups, and their group members would aid their learning. For the students that are more advanced, they would be able to draw further connections and develop a deeper meaning - not only for themselves, but for the entire group. That would be their extension should they choose to extend their meaning of the activity. I chose to delete some of those sites because I felt they were not as appropriate for the students and the topic.

From this, I learned a lot about how to actually create a unit, and most of all, I learned how meaningful, helpful and necessary collaboration is in the creation/development of any unit, but especially an inquiry based unit.