Professional Development

My goal as an educator is to inspire a passion for mathematics and for learning.

I will accomplish this by:

• Offering instruction based on a thorough understanding of the curriculum and its applications.
• Developing my Personal Learning Network (PLN) to communicate with educators and professional to provide a well-rounded understanding of the mathematical principles we will explore.
• Offering and sharing the best teaching and assessment practices among colleagues and educational professionals.

Curriculum. The Standards of Learning are published for Fairfax County by the Virginia Department of Education. The standards framework, and pacing guides can be found here:

http://doe.virginia.gov/testing/sol/standards_docs/mathematics/2016/index.shtml

PLN - I will develop my Personal Learning Network to address three areas of teaching.

• Real life applications of math skills: I will communicate with educators and professionals in areas that use specific math skills. I will communicate these applications to students as we begin each new unit. For example, before beginning a unit on quadratic equations, we will see how these understanding can apply to aeronautics, space travel, finances, among other applications.
• Cross cultural education: I will use social networking to address, connect with, and learn from classroom in other parts of the United States, other countries, and other cultures. The students will lead and learn from each other, offering perspective in educational styles, cultural differences, and common interests.
• Cross curriculum education: One of the strongest properties of math is that it can be applied to every industry. From science, engineering, and technology to art, music, design, and performance. I will establish professional relationships with educators and professionals across curricula to develop insights into how we can learn from each other. We will lend our specific perspectives to develop greater education for all of our students.

Teaching and Assessment Practices

The following are some of the links that serve as sources and opportunities to share our learning practices:

• Teachers Pay Teachers - https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/
• Pinterest: Math-Speak - https://www.pinterest.com/mathspeak/pins/
• Twitter: Handle - MSherman11235 - https://twitter.com/MSherman11235
• Educators' PLN - http://edupln.ning.com/
• YouTube - ttp://www.YouTube.com

The importance of empathy. Among all of the qualities that we’ve explored regarding Global Citizenship, the one that has always stood out the most to me is “empathy.” It gets harder to find. J. J. Morrissey put it best when he said, “ I began to realize that perhaps the single most important life skill, and one that seemed to be wholly absent from the public forum, was empathy” (Morrissey, 2017, para. 3). The ability to understand and share the feelings of another. I want this to be a leading determination of how I conduct myself as an educator. I want to layer it into every math class. I want to introduce human elements to our math lessons that validate our commonalities. We grow together, but to do so, we must embrace our mutual experiences. We have to really see each other before we can truly embrace each other.

The vitality of educator communication re: cross curriculum & best practices. In addition to knowing each other, we have to build opportunities for our students to merge their understandings. School is a fantastic opportunity to focus on individual curricula, but without the opportunity to apply those concepts to other pursuits, students will only understand them as isolated individual applications. Find ways to work together with other content areas goes beyond introducing real-world examples. It gives students to get their hands and minds on actual experience. According to Carlos Aedo, “An experience has an active component which changes the context in which experiences are had: society and the physical world and its conditions” (Aedo, 2002, para. 2).

PLN - Personal Learning Network. Without being connected on a wider scale, we cannot gauge our best efforts; we have no source of new perspective. Our ideas may develop, but they do so slowly. Even if we stumble on a wonderfully progressive and helpful concept, without a network to disperse this information, we can only benefit a small handful of students. Furthermore, without sharing our ideas, our our students have no one to truly share, debate, and develop them further.

Sharing out instructional and philosophical ideas is the best way to strengthen our educational system. This gets thoughts, concepts, approaches, and perspectives out to our fellow educators. Shared ideas can come together to form something even greater than their initial parts. This is also how the best ideas get out to more students, who can then share them with other and bring them new meaning and application.

If you want a garden, you have to distribute the seeds.

#edvapln

April 28, 2018

I found a wonderful resource in #SirKenRobinson! His educational ideas are far reaching and focus on some of the big questions we've examined, like homework and creativity. As new educators, these fundamentals can help us shape our future curricula.