Reflecting the year...

Every year, on the day after the last day of school, I have sat down with my journal and reflected on my teaching efforts. It helps me to take a third eye look at my interactions with my students, my techniques and make plans for next year. I have decided to go technical with part of my reflection and post it here.

The past two years our school has focused on the book "Whatever It Takes". This was an initiative by our principal and superintendent that I had some reservations about at first. We spent the first year reading the book and learning about PLCs, Professional Learning Communities. What frustrated me about this initiative was that I felt we were already doing it in our school. PLCs stress the importance of making sure the students learn what you are trying to teach them. I had already been using the Understanding by Design from Wiggins and McTighe. I started my lesson planning with the end in mind, I formulated my essential questions, and stressed individualization in my lessons, allowing choices and autonomy. I took the time to get to know all my students on a individual level as well as their parents, sending weekly letters home about their child's progress, and emailed the good and the bad to keep the communication lines open. Being a small staff of only 12 teachers, I know that the other teachers were doing this as well. As a group, we also meet weekly to discuss our student concerns as well as celebrate our student's successes. This is one of my favorite parts about teaching at WCC. We all give up our Friday morning planning time to spend 1 1/2 hours with each other. We start with our concerns about our students. Important information is shared so we are all on the same page and plans are made to support that student in whatever is going on in their life. I do have to admit that at times during my 9 year tenure, I would at times get frustrated with this process as some staff would take this time to vent rather then share true concerns, making it seem more like gossip. All in all, this is a truly valuable process and I appreciate the time to support our students. We end every meeting announcing the successes of the week. This is usually accompanied by applause and tears of joy.

This past year, we assigned four groups of PLCs that met during our Friday meeting time in an attempt to be more action oriented. This all looked good on paper, but it ended up just chopping up what little time we did get and everyone felt disconnected and we actually got less work done with our students. In our setting this was not a good thing, we unfortunately had to rely on email to communicate concerns across the whole staff and this lead to miscommunication. We met as a large group at the end of this year and discussed these issues. We all agreed to go back to our large group share out as a whole staff again, but agreed that we did learn something about being more precise and focusing on the problem, rather getting caught up in the emotions. It will be interesting to see if we revert back to our old ways or continue to grow from this year.