Application

January 19, 2018

It is with a sense of optimism and adventure that I submit my application for the Master of Education program at the University of Vermont. If accepted, I believe that my studies will afford me the opportunity to further my career, increase my effectiveness as an educator, and increase my contributions to the positive future of our society.

I graduated from the University of Vermont in 2013, procured my teaching license, and with the idea of graduate school in the back of my head, embarked on the odyssey that is my education career thus far. I have been a study hall supervisor, a paraeducator, a behavior interventionist, a long-term substitute, a high school teacher, and currently, a middle school teacher at Harwood Union Middle School. I have worked at five different schools, gaining new perspectives, building fresh pedagogies, and using these pieces to construct the educator I am now. Currently, I am ready to ascend the next steep learning curve in my career having discovered the following: Education is undergoing a major transformation in Vermont. The information age has made instantly accessible the history of human knowledge in the form of a device that sits in our pockets. Schools are shifting emphasis from what we know (facts) to what we know how to do (skills). With this idea in mind, my efforts to provide engaging lessons with life relevance have left me both curious and excited. I want to know how we can guide this educational transformation in a way that harnesses the power of human psychology--with all of its idiosyncrasies--in the modern age. Having settled into a permanent position, I am ready to explore this quandary. I believe that returning to the University of Vermont for the Master of Education program is my opportunity to do exactly that.

As a former middle school student whose engagement level often fell in the category of strategic compliance, I have made it my continuing mission to provide my students with curriculum that is interesting and meaningful, with real world applications. Often, I succeed in this endeavor. When students make connections between class materials and other aspects of their lives, I know I have succeeded. When parents tell me about the dinner table conversations they have about my social studies curriculum, I know I have succeeded. However, sometimes I fail. When even a single student expresses boredom, or if they do not see any relevance in a particular assignment, it bothers me. I am a reflective teacher, so I find these successes and failures both valuable and motivating. In either case, I regularly search for new ways to build, modify, and supplement my instruction in efforts to challenge, engage, and bring meaning to all learners.

This reflective nature is best exemplified by the ethnography unit I delivered to my seventh graders this year. Over the past year, I had been thinking a lot about the things I could do to improve upon the ethnography unit (that I had taught for the first time last year), how to make the Personal Learning Plan process more meaningful for students, how to integrate more co-teaching and interdisciplinary learning, how to use Act 77’s mandate for personalized learning, and how to reach the highest levels of student engagement. This past fall’s ethnography unit was a culmination of these things. For this unit, each student was given the following task: choose a topic related to the Mad River Valley community, find a community member (or multiple) who they believe could speak about that topic, set up interviews with those people, record interviews with audio or video, storyboard their footage into a the story they want to tell, then creatively edit that footage into their final product using audio or video editing software. In the end, our sixty-seven students created an ethnographic case study of the Mad River Valley community. This unit was co-planned by the English teacher on my team and I, with some of the instruction happening in his class, some in mine, and several times, we opened the wall between our rooms to co-teach lessons to double-sized classes. Over the course of the unit, we adapted our plans based on consultations with the Middle Grades Collaborative, the Vermont Folklife Center, the PLP Pathways professional development program, and Angela Evancie, the host of Vermont Public Radio’s Brave Little State podcast. The project was deliberately designed to integrate Act 77’s Three Pillars of Personalization, all for the purpose of reaching toward the highest levels of student engagement. We utilized and refined our system of proficiency-based assessment (which Harwood has been using for the last two years). In the spirit of flexible pathways, this project included a great deal of choice on the the part of the students; Their project topic, the people they interviewed, and the format of their final product were all up to them. Lastly, this project was directly incorporated into PLPs through reflection on future implications as well as connections to transferable skills and proficiencies (Harwood’s Ten Learning Expectations). In the end, based on three surveys given over the course of the year, three exit tickets given over the course of the project, and a student panel, I concluded that student engagement did increase measurably. This action research proposal, findings, and implications can be found here: Nick: Action Research Project

My academic approach to this project kindled my interest in graduate studies, as I feel they would enhance my effectiveness as an educator. Therefore, I feel that this is an auspicious time in my career to begin my Masters in Education. I believe that UVM’s Curriculum and Instruction program will develop my skills to engage students by designing a student-centered, proficiency embedded and 21st century curriculum for my classes.