My personal growth goals for this year was to grow as a professional educator by focusing on three areas. These are: Engaging and Supporting All Students in Learning, Creating and Maintaining Effective Environments For Students Learning, and Developing As A Professional Educator. Over the course of this year I learned how to balance having a rigorous curriculum and providing social-emotional-learning (SEL) lessons with students in their first year back in person since going to distance learning in March of 2020 as students struggled getting back into the groove of in-person learning.
When looking at my initial and final self-assessments I noticed two trends. Many areas I have stayed more or less in the same areas, without much in what I would call "growth." As I realized over the course of this year, after realizing how overwhelmed many of my students felt with returning to school trying to make the same demands we had pre-Covid shutdown, without much time to allow them to reacclimate to the school setting, that I overestimated my abilities in some of these areas, or at least that's how it has felt and I moved down to applying from integrating in a couple of areas. In an effort to deal with this and other concerns that students had, I took time away from content from time to time to help students deal with their myriad of emotions regarding everything that was bothering them. What did move, a lot, however was CSTP 4: Planning Instruction and Designing Learning Experiences for All Students, which went from being ranked 6th to 1st. This likely comes from my attempts to differentiate for the multitude of needs that my students faced in their first year back.
Engaging All Students
As a new teacher this was one of my first priorities at the start of this school year. Having been a substitute in the district, I knew that I might find some of my students challenging, especially not having a lot of experience subbing in the Twentynine Palms area. I have worked hard to connect with my students this year and getting them to engage in class in various ways.
Positive Learning Environment Through Equity & Social Emotional Learning (SEL)
Building off my experience with engaging my students, I began to realize we had some other issues at hand that needed addressed. These specifically included creating a positive learning environment through equity and by partaking in various SEL lessons and activities in order to help students realize that not everything in class needed to be hyper focused on our content in order for them to learn valuable lessons that would help them both now and in the future. This wound up being so important that I spent two inquiries on this during the holiday season and again when we came back from winter break. Throughout this process I created some very strong connections with a many of my students, especially among my 7th grade students. While my 8th graders have appreciated many of the efforts I have taken to help them, the 7th grade students had various issues around campus that I helped them to learn how to deal with. These included issues with bullies and high anxiety due to testing and other school life concerns that they had.
Teacher Wellness
While working on the prior two inquiries, I realized that I had begun neglecting myself in order to take care of my students needs. This was an area I thought might come up at some point, especially being a new teacher. Especially after I had students begin talking to me about some of their prior trauma's, after creating such strong connections with many of them, I started having an even bigger issue separating myself from my work. While being something I tried to work on throughout the year, with some mild success, I realize, as we wrap up this school year, that I still have quite a bit of work to do in order to really get to a point that is far better for my own wellbeing.
One thing that I am proud of this year, is how I have been able to make a positive impact on several students this year, who no one else on campus, has had much success with. Some of these are students who are not actually in any of my classes, but who I interact with around campus, like when I open my classroom during lunches to help students avoid drama during that unstructured time, when we had a lot more fights happening on campus. These students will come to find me just to say hi. When I have to ask them, or their friends to do something, I rarely have to ask more than once or twice. Sometimes it these little interactions that obviously makes a students day, which in turn makes me feel better, especially on a bum day. Watching kids be happy and successful is one of the joys that I got out of teaching this year.