New School Year Resolutions for 2011-2012

I am joining The Clutter-Free Classroom's New Year Resolution Linky Party today.  I love to make goals and plans for new school year during my stress free summer (well as stress free as being the mother of three young boys is).  One of the things I love most about my job is getting to have a fresh start every new school year.  How many careers do you get a do over every single year?  Now I must say that I am coming off of probably the best year I have ever had since becoming a 7th grade math teacher.  I got to have two accelerated math classes and our students were just fabulous.  I definitely enjoyed my students last year because a group that awesome comes around only a few times in your career.

I have been thinking about my goals all summer and it will be nice to have them all in one place for reference.

In my classroom:

1)  WORK STATIONS:  I am going to implement work stations into my math class this year.  I have been doing lots of research this summer and unfortunately I am not finding many resources out there for math stations at the middle school level.  This is a definite work in progress for me.  I will have a corner set up in my classroom with materials organized for student use.

2)  DIFFERENTIATION:  I will enhance what I do to differentiate in my classroom.  This would be for intervention and enrichment.  I already do several things, but there is always room for improvement.

3)  LITERACY:  I will incorporate more literacy into my math class.  I started off the year doing a great job with vocabulary and word walls and I hope to maintain that all year for this coming school year.  I want to get the students to do more writing in my math class.  It is difficult because we are under so much pressure with the adoption of the CCSS.

4)  COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS:  I will work to align what I am doing with the CCSS.

  

5)  ORGANIZATION:  I will do a better job of keeping my binders and materials organized as I use them.  I will also declutter the boxes of materials I have been holding onto for too long.  I will organize my math manipulatives in my blue cabinet.

As a middle school math liaison:

1)  SMARTBOARD:  I will work with the other 7th grade math teachers to help them with their new SMARTBoards.  I will also share all of my SB files and lessons with them.  I will create some new files that can be used to support the CCSS and our math curriculum.

2)  COLLABORATION:  I will structure our math PLC time to work on meaningful tasks to improve the math education of all 7th grade students.  I will share best practices and curriculum materials I create.

3)  MATH REVIEW COMMITTEE:  I will help to lead the K-12 math review (as the middle school liaison).  This will be a challenging year long process and I will stay positive and focused on the task.

4)  BE A POSITIVE FORCE:  This would go under both my teacher and liaison roles.  I want to use my various leadership positions to continue to move our school forward in a positive manner.  I will continue to serve on the School Effectiveness Committee, the Positive Climate Committee and as a Building Rep.  I have also been chosen to be on the interview committee for our new AP.  We just found out last week that our AP (who I really liked) is leaving to take a HS AP/Athletic Director job at the district he came to us from.  :(   Good for him sad for us.