One of the ways that I have continued to grow as a professional educator is to read and reflect on current trends in education, ways to improve my teaching craft, and read content specific books about Spanish language and culture.
In the past two years I have read many books and wrote quick reflections on how they apply to my teaching. This include Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed, Robyn R. Jackson’s Never Work Harder Than Your Students, Tony Wagner’s The Global Achievement Gap Roxanna Elden’s See Me After Class, Sam Seidel’s Hip Hop Genius Will Richardson’s Why School?, Seth Godin’s Stop Stealing Dreams, P. J. Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, and Ken Robinson’s
I also seek out other educators suggestions by following their blogs and twitter handles. There are many Spanish teachers who share amazing resources and lesson ideas through their blogs, such as Zambombazo and The Creative Language Class. World Language teachers have a weekly chat on twitter on Thursdays from 8-9pm (#langchat) where we discuss topics that range from assessing student learning to ways to stay in the target language during an entire class. They are then summarized and archived by Erica Fischer.
Two final places I go on the internet to stay current is Edutopia and Free Technology for Teachers. I have found great resources and suggestions on both sites.
Reflecting
As evident by the links to reflections on the books I’ve read in the past two years, one of the most common activities I engage in as a means to track my growth as a professional educator is to blog.
I started blogging when I began to travel during college. It was a way to keep my family and friends in the U.S. informed about what I was doing and seeing. I still keep a travel blog and updated it regularly when I spent summers in Spain and Mexico participating in professional development with the National Endowments of the Humanities.
Blogging is a great way to chronicle a journey. Before I was even labeled a “journeyman teacher” I was writing about my adventures integrating technology on my Teacher Tech blog. I’ve also used that blog as I participated in a MOOC about teaching Spanish in a blended learning environment. Currently, I use that blog as a way to reflect on unique projects we are developing in our class, like trying out different free online language learning websites, or how and why we blog in our class.
The teacher tech blog is for fellow educators, but I use blogging as a way to communicate with students as well. One blog I maintain is The Hot Tamale Blog. This is a place where I post current events that relate to Spanish, pop culture that uses vocabulary that we’re working on, or fun videos or activities that can extend a student’s knowledge of Spanish language/culture. Each post has extra credit/optional activities that students can reply via email. This has been a great classroom tool because we set the expectation that if you are “done” with the task of the day you are expected to go to the Hot Tamale Blog and choose an activity from there to continue working.
Another blog I update every once in a while is my teacher blog for students. Here I try to highlight quality student work and promote positive learning habits and fun things we do in class.