Goals for Next Year

My "teacher toolbox" has grown significantly during my time in this graduate program. I can now go forward into next year (and beyond) with a new, refreshed look on best practice teaching. I have learned so much from my learning community friends. I think we all have grown with each other and have become even better educators. 

I am committing to three goals for the 2015-2016 school year:

1. Fine-tune my guided math system

This year I had a successful time "diving in" with guided math through my action research project. I am going to spend time this summer finding and creating new activities (woohoo! grade change! 1st grade!) and setting up a better tracking system for student progress. I will also create a more thorough plan for transitioning into guided math since I'll really have kindergartners at the beginning of the year (yikes!). 

2. Create more pre-assessments and varied assessments 

I did some of this with guided math this year but am going to create more of my own assessments over the summer and into next year. I used ones from our book but wasn't too impressed with them; I didn't feel like they accurately assessed student understanding. I also want to extend those pretests into spelling and differentiate more across the board for students. I have been wanting to do this but am looking forward to having more time to come up with a solid way to do this. I have done more hands-on assessments in our science curriculum this year. I am going to add more of these opportunities in other subjects as well.

3. Redesign my literacy block

Next year, grades K-3 at my school will begin to use the Daily 5 as a guide to our literacy block. I will work with the other 1st grade teacher to push the envelope on getting past the "old" schedule and way of teaching reading/language arts. I think this will be my most challenging goal because it involves other people getting on board as well. My partner is completely on board but our reading resource teacher is very stuck in her ways. We may have to ruffle some feathers (which is NOT my thing to do) but I am willing to try a ton of new things since I am starting totally fresh in a new grade level. There are so many great things to try that will cause other people to be flexible with their schedules. It will be a challenge but has the potential to have really great results.