Professional Development to me is forever learning and growing and here is how I want to do that:
I will continue to seek out leadership and facilitation opportunities in order to better my classroom/meeting management and facilitation. I want to further learn how to lead from within my classroom, rather than from the front.
- Servant-Leadership and Community Leadership in the 21st Century
Keynote Address, The Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership annual conference, June 1999
- How to Make Meetings Work! by Michael Doyle and David Straus (New York: Berkley Books, 1993).
I will continue being involved in local, state, and national legislation, especially legislation regarding education. By keeping up with politics, I am able to adapt my government lesson plans to current events, which would make the lessons more engaging for my students.
- Demarest, Amy B. Place-Based Curriculum Design: Exceeding Standards through Local Investigations. Routledge, 2014.
- "A Wider Lens: Connecting Local and Global Themes in Your Teaching" Workshop
I will continue to work to create community wherever I go. I truly believe that it is important for me as a teacher to become a part of the community I am working in to not only inform the place-based aspect of my lesson plans but also to try and see the struggles my students may be facing in their communities and lives. The best way to do this, I believe, is by gathering around some food and just talking.
- Ron Beard, Practical Skills for Community Development.
- Ron Beard, Collaborative Leadership.
I will remind myself that everything I need to teach my students about history can be found right here in Maine. I can connect national shifts and events to how it affected Maine. I also would like to bring students to historic places in Maine that show the effects humans/events have on communities and landscapes (this picture is of an old military base in Portland, Maine).
- Demarest, Amy B. Place-Based Curriculum Design: Exceeding Standards through Local Investigations. Routledge, 2014.
- "Primary Source" Workshop.
I will strive to talk about environmental implications of topics we talk about in class. I also hope to get my students out of the class into the community or nature whenever applicable. In order to make sure I work on this aspect of my professional development I will make sure to keep connections to outdoor educators in my local school and my COA alumi network.
I will strive to remember that the arts are just as important as "academics." In order to do this, I want to make it a point to have a creative aspect of my projects for students who express themselves in visual or auditory ways rather than in written essays. As a person who does not consider themselves artistically talented in any way, it would be easy to fall into a lecture and essay based testing and instruction method. This could hinder some of my students' expression, therefore working on this aspect of my professional development is important to me.
- Kelly Sanborn, Supporting Students with Disabilities.
- Bonnie Tai, Curriculum Design and Assessment.
I will strive to become a better listener. This skill affects my life not only as a friend/person, future politician but also as a teacher. Based on my desire to be more than just a teacher, but a support system for students who are at-risk I need to be able to sit and actively listen to my students' thoughts, comments, and concerns without interrupting or getting distracted. This is a skill I plan to continue to work on to help benefit my relationships with peers, colleagues, students, and parents.
- How to be an active listener. https://www.wikihow.com/Be-a-Good-Listener
Most importantly, I will remind myself every day where my roots come from. I was once in the same seats as these students. I experienced similar struggles which has lead me to have strong compassion and empathy for people. On the hard days at school where I question why I even became a teacher, it will be important for me to take a moment and look at where I came from, why I am teaching, and how teaching will help me be the best advocate for education I can be.
- Scott Swann, Ecology: Natural History