This month I’m doing TeachThought’s Reflective teaching 30-day challenge. I’m a few days late (just saw Laura Sexton’s reflection posts last night!), so today I’m answering the questions for days 1-3.
Day 1: Write your goals for the school year. Be as specific or abstract as you’d like to be!
1. Organized desk: I need the my work area to be uncluttered! “Reset” my desk to tidy on planning periods, and before leaving school in the afternoon.
2. Stay on top of lesson plans: I’m already struggling with this. I am MUCH less stressed when I have my plans written out a week ahead of time. I need to start working on next week’s lesson plans during my planning period Thursday morning, and have at least three days sketched out and copies made for Monday morning before I leave for the weekend.
3. Speak more target language: In a 45 minute class period, 90% target language means less than five minutes in English! This is still a challenge for me, and an area I’m working on improving. The key is planning level-appropriate lesson activities – I hate to plan a great communicative speaking activity, then have to spend five minutes explaining it in English! So, to break it down: plan intentionally for target language use, and use English purposefully!
Day 2: Write about one piece of technology that you would like to try this year, and why. You might also write about what you’re hoping to see out of this edtech integration.
My school is transitioning to one-to-one with MacBook airs, but none of my students have laptops yet. I am hopeful that the computers will be issued to freshmen and sophomores by Christmas, but it’s entirely possible that the roll-out will be delayed another year. In the meantime, I love Quizlet for vocabulary practice, and am allowing students to use their phones in class to support their learning (we had a discussion at the beginning of the year about my expectations and appropriate use of technology). I am looking forward to the 1:1 transition, but am enjoying the current “medium-tech” atmosphere in my classroom!
Day 3: Discuss one “observation” area that you would like to improve on for your teacher evaluation.
Just filled out my self-assessment for TKES today! I wrote improvement goals for Standard 5 (Assessment Strategies) and Standard 8 (Academically Challenging Environment). For assessment strategies, I want to continue assessing in authentic, meaningful ways (comprehension of contextualized language – not recall-based isolated word vocab quizzes!), and begin incorporating listening comprehension tasks into my mix of assessments (honestly, I don’t currently do listening tests because I’m intimidated! Which is a bad reason not to – so I’m going to learn how to assess listening, and assess it well :)). For Academically Challenging Environment, my goal is to speak more *comprehensible* target language, aiming for ACTFL’s recommended 90%, every day.
Ms. Brown Spanish 