Continuing to Learn
As my career progresses, I certainly want to continue coaching and advising in extra-curricular activities. Extra-curricular activities engage students positively at school with their peers and teachers. In addition to extra-curricular activities, I want our students to have a positive learning experience and succeed academically. All of the teachers in our district want our students to be successful, and working together will help us do just that. Lastly, I have an interest in working with adults at the community college or university level to improve our community.
As a teacher, I continue to learn about my practice to improve education for students. Thus, I will do the same as a sports coach and club advisor. I want to stay up-to-date about how to connect with students, teach them better, provide them with timely and meaningful feedback, as well as communicate with colleagues. Additionally, I want the students in our district to do well academically. One way to help with this is to go beyond sharing what I have learned and tried in my classroom from a conference. I can offer to lead a professional development session at our school, rather than wait for my curriculum director to ask. This way, I am helping to establish a network of teachers all working on the same concept or strategy at the same time to improve our district. Lastly, I am interested in teaching at the community college or university level. Continuing the education of the adults in our community is yet another way to build our community to be the best that it can be.
One way to learn more about coaching is to learn about new technology to provide feedback to our athletes. In one of my master’s degree classes, we learned about using video to record our athletes, make a voice recording, and write on the video itself to share the feedback with the athletes. I would like to learn about using a phone app called Ubersense, which is also a video analysis tool. This video analysis platform is free and uses my phone to record. In addition, there are many sharing options to provide timely feedback to the athlete, including email and social media. To learn this new tool, there are tutorials in the app itself, tutorials on the Ubersense website, and videos on YouTube. Moreover, I will be open to learn with and from students and colleagues as a technology community as well. My goal for learning Ubersense would be for athletes to receive feedback from me as their coach, and have the opportunity to analyze their own running form to self-evaluate and improve.
A second learning area of future learning that interests me is leading and maintaining professional development. After attending the training for Illuminate data management system and implementing it in my classroom, my principal asked if I would co-lead a professional development session to help other teachers. I enjoyed working with a community of learners, being a support for my colleagues as they had questions with working with this new system, as well as working together to find solutions. I felt the same spark of building a small community with what I learned at the “Exemplary Practice: Connecting Mathematics and CTE”. Therefore, I would like to learn more about how to lead professional development, cater to the needs to the group, as well as how to sustain the professional group that we created. One course offered through Michigan State University (MSU) is Training and Professional Development. Another way to learn more about professional development and working with teachers is to work with the person that I attended the conference with, set up regular meetings, and find ways to work together to keep our learning going.
Another area of interest that I would like to learn about as well is teaching at the community college level. Baker College is near my district, and several of my colleagues teach courses there in addition to teaching K-12 courses. I believe that educating both adolescents and adults benefits the entire community as a whole. As a math teacher, I enjoy teaching remediation courses at the high school level because I can help them fill in any academic gaps in their learning and boost their confidence to learn. Yet, an adult’s experience of “being bad at math” has been ingrained even longer. One option is to teach math courses. On the other hand, I do enjoy working with and mentoring beginning teachers. Thus, teaching courses for new teachers is another possibility. I will learn about teaching at the collegiate level by taking Teaching in Post-Secondary Education at MSU.
