2012 New Year Resolutions

Better late than never!  I am joining the linky party over at one of my favorite blogs, A Teacher's Treasure.  I did some resolutions last summer before the school year started.  I am going to stick with those for the remainder of the school year.

Goals for 2012:

Professional:

Here are the New School Year Resolutions for 2011-2012 I made for myself back in July, a month prior to starting the school year, when idealism and free time were running high.  Unfortunately I tend to set lofty and sometimes unrealistic goals for myself considering that I am married and have three active young boys involved in numerous sports and extra curricular activities.  If I completely neglected my family (and some days it feels like I do) I might have a chance to achieve all my goals, but that just would not be fair to anyone involved.

There are a finite number of hours in the day and try as I might, I have yet to discover how to freeze time so I can accomplish everything I would like to in a 24 hour period, also known as a day.  My main goal in 2012 will be to achieve a better balance between my professional and personal life.  I feel like this school year my professional responsibilities are taking a toll on my family time.  I have so many meetings and commitments outside of the school day that there are many days that I do not get home until after my family has already eaten dinner.  I know that this is unavoidable under certain circumstances, but it just seems that certain weeks are really bad with meetings.

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.  This has been a fail so far, but I aim to change that the remainder of the year.  I have an area set up and have gotten some materials together, but I have not gotten this underway yet.  This will be my MAIN focus for January.  To get these up and running.

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.  I am happy with my progress on this goal.  I have used pre-assessments and exit slips to plan differentiated activities.  I have also been able to differentiate when using the round robin strategy, by offering a challenge group.  I have an ultimate goal of doing tiered assignments and activities for intervention/practice/enrichment.  

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.  I started off the year strong with my word wall and have sort of fizzled.  I would like to incorporate more literacy strategies into my classroom.

4)  COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS:  I will work to align what I am doing with the CCSS. We are using the majority of our PLC time (we meet 2-3x/week) to look at alignment with the CCSS.  We have spent the past month looking at what we can take out of our current curriculum and what needs to be added in.  I would like to start producing some units aligned to 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.  Organization is always the first thing to fall by the wayside when time is limited.  In the past I have used a teacher convention day in October to work in my classroom for eight hours getting "caught up".  Unfortunately due to the sad sad state of affairs in Wisconsin Education at the moment, and our teacher convention day became a full day of district inservice.  Enough said. :P  I am currently teaching out of Modules 3 (Regular) and 4 (Accelerated) and all the papers from Modules 1 and 2 are stacked in neat piles waiting to be put back in their respective binders.  It's strange because everything next year will be completely different.    I do make an effort to keep my desk neat and organized.  I try to do that at least once a week.  If my desk gets cluttered I start to go a bit crazy.

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.  I have shared all my SMARTBoard files with the other 7th grade math teachers.  I have not really had to time to develop much new for the CCSS.  It's a work in progress.

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.  We have been swamped this year during PLC with math review committee tasks.  We have also spent tons of time making sure that our common assessments are actually the same among the three of us.  I think we have collaborated more than ever this year.

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.  I think this has been a success and I am doing everything possible to do my part on this committee.

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. This is always a work in progress for me.  Our new AP is beyond fabulous and has been such a positive force for our school.  What a blessing he has been.  I continue to try and stay positive (although believe me I have my moments where I slip).  It has been an adjustment to have two new members on my teaching team.  The dynamics of our team have changed and things don't seem to be as fun as they used to.    The new teachers are both very nice and are good teachers.  Everything is just so serious and intense. Hopefully everyone (including me) will lighten up in the new year.  It's hard to start over after teaching with the same people for 8 yrs .  Fortunately I have my Teacher BFF Linda to keep me sane through it all.




As far as personal goals I want to:


Live healthy
Love generously
Be happy and content with all God has blessed me with


I will no doubt be making a more specific list of personal goals, but for now that really encapsulates what is most important to me.  I need to live those beliefs.