Teaching Resolutions for the Second Half of the School Year

The year 2016 is quickly coming to an end.  As the new calendar year plus the second half of the school year approaches, I want to take time and reflect on my practice.  

I resolve to:


1.   Stay Organized​

• Normally by the end of the day my desk is a mess.  As the day goes on I just dump things on my desk and continue teaching.  By the end of the day it looks like a tornado hit.  Often at the end of the day instead of cleaning it up and organizing my desktop, I ignore it.  There is no excuse for this.  I can take five minutes to organize my desk.
  
• Another thing that I need to work on is getting papers passed back in a timely manner.  I have a bin labeled for each class.  After I correct a set of papers I throw them in the bin.  The papers are corrected in a timely manner, but I often forget to hand  back the papers.  Once again, there is no excuse for this.  I can take 5 minutes every couple of days to have students hand out papers.

2.  Add Movement Into Lessons

• I am a fidgety person.  I have a hard time sitting still.  I am always wiggling, moving, tapping and stretching.  I am an adult and I need to move frequently.  If I need this, then my seventh and eighth graders need this too. At the beginning of the school year I started adding brainbreaks to my classes.  They take two to three minutes and are meant to reenergize and refocus the students.  I love them and the students do too.  The problem is I am not as consistent as I would like to be with this.  It should be everyday in every class, somedays it is and then there are others when I think, "It's Thursday, I haven't done a brainbreak this week."  I  can take three minutes half way through class to give my students a brainbreak.

.   Contact Parents More

•  I  have many ways of communicating with parents: email, class blog, remind app and phone calls.  I use all of these on a fairly regular basis.  I contact parents when I have concerns about their child, but I don't think that is enough.  I would like to be able to contact parents more often when I have something amazing to say about their child, for something that I am proud of.  I think that establishing a positive relationship with parents is important.  This one is one that I already do, but want to do more of.  This is not an easy one to do.  I see over 100 students every day, many of my parents do not speak English or have an email or working phone.
  

4.   Learn More

• One thing that I like to do is learn.  My goal here is to continue to improve my content knowledge of Social Studies and to continue to learn and implement new technologies to help keep my students engaged in class.  
  

5.   Improve Classroom Management

• I would like to be more consistent with my classroom management skills.  This ties into organization.
  
•  I want to keep better annecdotal records of my students.  I have a system to take annecdotal records now, I want to do a better job at it.  That may mean revising and tweaking my system a little bit.
• I want to make sure that I have a nice balance between home and school. 
• I want to make sure that I am consistent with my discipline in class.  
  

Here's to a happy healthy 2017 and a great second half of the school year!