Personal Goals

My goal for teaching vocabulary was to spend 5 minutes per day allowing students to practice or study their vocabulary words for the week. I have been doing well with this goal and have made this my bell ringer for the beginning of each class period. I have varied how the students practice their vocabulary such as having them read a story with the vocabulary words in it or writing sentences using their words. I have yet to observe 2 teachers and how they teach vocabulary which was part of my goal.

I believe literature is extremely important and therefore made my reading goal to read two short stories with my class and compare and contrast the various parts of a story. I also wanted to discuss the best method to read a short story with my class with one of my special education colleagues. I have read a few short stories in my English class but have not yet compared and contrasted them. I have met with one of my colleagues and we discussed how she reads stories in her class. She stated that she usually puts the students into heterogeneous groups and assigns them different chunks of the story to read.

I believe some of the best resources I have as a teacher is other teachers. This is why I made my writing goal to observe my mentor teacher and one other English teacher while instructing students on how to write a topic and conclusion sentence. I have observed another special education teacher who teaches an LD English class which is a higher level then my class. The teacher I observed taught me a few different techniques on how to instruct students in their writing.

I will admit I have done very poorly on my goal for teaching grammar. My goal is to read the book “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” to better my understanding of grammar. I have already checked this book out of the library but I have yet to begin reading it. I would like to begin reading this book over our long Presidents day weekend.

I had a major breakthrough on my goal for integrating technology into my English class. My goal was to learn to use a Smartboard and integrate it into my English curriculum. I originally thought I would get a Smartboard from the library when I wanted to use one but to my surprise, a Smartboard was installed in my room this week! Woo Hoo!! This had made this goal very easy and I have already begin to experiment with this new piece of technology.

The last goal I had was in regards to assessment. My goal is was to develop a checklist to monitor the progress my students make towards the mastery of a subject. I have actually developed a checklist and have begin putting it to good use. The checklist has the various topics we cover throughout the semester. There is then 3 categories that I then use to monitor the progress of my students on the various topics: Limited, Proficient and Mastery.