A Quest to be the Best Teacher in...

In my 4th year of teaching in an international school in South Korea, I felt stagnant. While I knew I was not a perfect teacher by any means, I wanted to learn more about teaching and to challenge myself as a teacher in a way that was different from what my school's professional development offered. Therefore, I decided to pursue a Master of Arts in Education (MAED) degree at my alma mater (Michigan State University).

My Original Quest:

My original goal while entering the program was to learn more about teaching literacy. The school I was working at had an amazing literacy instructional coach (Anne Harris), who helped me grow in how to teach literacy, helped me learn the best literacy teaching practices (such as Words Their Way), and showed me additional resources I can use. I found her inspiring and hoped that in pursuing this program, I can further learn good literacy teaching practices.

The MAED Quest Journey and Side Quests:

Throughout the last few years in this program, I took a variety of different courses. Some were related to literacy. Some, such as "Creativity in Teaching and Learning" and "Teaching School Mathematics," were not. 

What prompted me to take these different courses? For some courses, it was curiosity. I was curious what those courses could mean and what I would learn from them. However, one of the main reasons was that I was beginning to realize that I was comfortable and confident when it came to teaching literacy. However, I needed support in teaching other subject areas, such as math and technology.

This development meant that my goal changed slightly. I was still pursuing my original goal of learning better literacy educational practices, but I started completing "side quests" of different courses that were unrelated to literacy. I knew that these courses were going to be challenging and that perhaps I would experience failures. However, surprisingly, those courses became the ones that I grew the most in, enjoyed the most, and found myself passionately applying into my teaching.

New Quest:

While I am still passionate about teaching literacy and learning about best practices in literacy education, I now have a multiple new passions. Currently, my main new goal and passion is learning how to best teach mathematics, how to differentiate in teaching math, and how to bring real-world math into the classroom for my young mathematicians.

"Fork in the road, decision tree, September, Discovery Park, Seattle, Washington, USA" by Wonderlane is licensed under CC BY 2.0.