I realize that graphic design isn’t an entirely traditional choice for professional development, but it’s my first choice for future learning. Graphic design is something that’s always interested me, and I think it’s important for teachers to utilize their passions to let their personalities shine through while they teach. For most of my life I’ve practiced photo and video editing as a hobby and side-job, and I’d like to extend that to include vector illustration and custom publishing layouts. In my classroom, I can see this being useful in a few ways. Learning graphic design means creating more effective, custom handouts for my students by having more control over visual layout. I can easily give all of my resources a unique, consistent look that’s more engaging for students than traditional plain-text documents. My hope is that this will encourage me to explore more ways to use tables and graphic organizers and push beyond traditional note sheets and outlines.

My work with this goal has already started via two programs: Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher. These symbiotic programs allow the user to create custom vector designs, then incorporate them in meant-for-print pages. I’ve begun working through the wonderfully made video tutorial series for each (Publisher here and Designer here) and purchased the official workbook for the latter.

I’ve already taken some steps to improve the accessibility of my lessons by creating an accessibility checklist for my classroom resources, but I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not enough. While my schooling has included a great deal of work related to accommodating more common learning disabilities such as dyslexia, ADHD, etc., I’d like to make sure I’m extending that reach to as many students as I possibly can. This goal has less specific envisioned end results since the point is that I don’t yet know what areas of my teaching I can improve. That being the case, I’d like step one to be some in-person work with more experienced professionals in the field of learning disabilities to help me develop more tangible goals. Given my location close to the Wisconsin-Illinois border, the myriad of learning opportunities provided by the Learning Disabilities Association of Illinois seems like a great place to start. This organization has multiple in-person events that interest me, including an October Fall Conference that I’ve inquired about attending.

One of the most interesting and frustrating things about teaching language arts is that it encompasses an incredibly wide range of subject matter. Not only are skills related to reading, writing, research, and speaking incredibly diverse, but even within each of those are swaths of different content types. While I enjoy almost all of these niches of my subject area, one that I feel I’ve done a disservice to is poetry. It’s a type of writing that’s rarely connected deeply with me, and my general indifference for it (compared to borderline obsession with, say, speech writing and short fiction) has resulted in lessons that, to me, seem nothing more than fine. My classes talk a bit about poetry, we learn the major types, and we discuss it in the way we would other literature. The problem is that poetry isn’t other literature, and I don't feel like I’m doing as much as I can with my lessons to open up the intricacies and beauty that poetry has the potential to inspire.

While I may not be able to force myself to enjoy poetry more than I do, I do think that better understanding how to take advantage of its properties to develop more engaging lessons is well within my reach. With a topic as seeded in passion and humanity as poetry, it makes sense to me to engage myself in learning in as personal a way as possible. I’ve yet to find any in-person events around me that I’d be able to attend, but starting with videos like Why People Need Poetry or The Power of Poetry have sparked passion in me, and I plan to supplement that passion with literature such as Spellbound: The Art of Teaching Poetry by Matthew Burgess and Harold Bloom’s The Art of Reading Poetry