Keeping my goals in check

-

 I started break a week ago with intentions of getting the first units of both classes set up. I'm almost there. In the process, I came across some highly recommended books. I got said books


and I proceeded to try and speed read them. I wanted to incorporate every idea from all the books in January. Thankfully, I came to my senses. The book on the right, Ambitious Science Teaching, is an awesome book but has tons and tons of information and I'm never going to get through it before school starts. So that book is now being placed on the top of my summer reading list. I will delve deep into that over the summer and incorporate it into my curriculum. 

The next book in the stack, Science Formative Assessment, is really  a list of formative assessment strategies to use in the classroom. They have 75. I'm going to go through that and choose maybe 3 or 4 to use this coming semester. Again, over the summer I will have more time to work on incorporating more. 

The 3rd book, Uncovering student ideas in physical science is another book that will wait until summer for me to peruse in great depth. I'm not sure I like that book or am going to use it, but I will definitely give it the time it needs over the summer. 

Finally, Success in Science, is an awesome book that actually has lesson plans ready to use. I am going to use some of the ideas in this book this semester and then work on incorporating more of the ideas next year. 

I feel like I'm growing as a person when I can approach something with my usual zeal, I'm going to do all the things!!!, and then back off and be more realistic about it. I don't have to do everything at once. I don't even have to do most of these things. I can pick and choose some ideas that fit my style and that I think will work in my classes and go from there. I do tend to be an all or nothing type and that really doesn't work in teaching. 

Okay, I'm feeling good about this, the pressure to read everything and have it all ready by Monday is now gone. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Going in too many directions????

-
Image
I'm having trouble organizing my lessons. There are a number of technology things that go with my lessons. I am trying to use Planbookplus to create my lesson plans: Which is great but has its limitations. So I thought I would keep all of my files in One Note so I could have access anywhere. That will be good but it is almost like creating lesson plans all over again. Then I have a class blog where things need to be uploaded and offered to the kids. As a result of trying all three of these things, I have completed nothing. All of them are half done and we have just completed the 2nd full week of school. I tried an external hard drive and thought that would be a good way to do it. It has proven to be more of a nightmare than a help. Ugggggggghhhhhhhhhhh!!!! What to do???? How do I organize all the electronic information I have???? How do I keep track of things and not make myself crazy??????? So that is my struggle this weekend. I am going to complete one or tw...
Read more

And so it begins.........

-
Image
We teachers returned to school on July 24th and the students returned on August 2nd. That means we had the kids 2 days last week, Wednesday and Thursday. And it went well. This year I had to revamp my classroom management system and I think I have something that will work for me. Let me explain; My first 7 years of teaching was at private schools. Even though these private schools were at the lower financial end of the spectrum and most of our students were on financial aid, they were nevertheless private school students. Classroom management was not a huge priority as these students did their work and listened and were respectful and all that stuff. So my classroom management was a little lax because it didn't need to be really strict and tough. Well, now I'm at a public school. And in spite of the fact that this is a charter school and parents have to go out of their way to send their students here, it is still a public school. Last year I handled my classroom management l...
Read more

A stroke of genius?????

-
Image
The ongoing theme of this blog has been organization. I've been teaching for 9 years, but I haven't found a way to organize my stuff that works really, really well for me. Every single year, I struggle finding things I know I have or recreating the wheel because I've forgotten I have something. So I've been working really, really hard to get organized once and for all with a system that works for me. I know that I need to have things written/printed and at my fingertips in order to make good use of them. If I have to go online and look it up it won't happen. I've played around with binders and didn't really use them after I set them up. The last 2 years I did find great success with planners. I would divide the day up into my classes - 4 each day - and jot notes on what was to happen that day. That worked great!! As long as I planned ahead. Too many days I would get to school and the planner was blank. That left me scrambling to figure out what I'm t...
Read more