The Next 5 Years
While reviewing my old goals and listening to Roselinde Torres talk about leadership, I can start to define what I am aiming to do with the chemistry curriculum and integrating PBL. It seems very clear to me that soon education will become something much different and much bigger than it has been in the past, and I am attempting to anticipate this change. Before civilizations were created, the children, who were not yet ready to work and hunt with the adults, needed to learn and practice skills necessary for survival. With advancements, this turned into the sharing and the memorization of knowledge and facts obtained from around the world and was put into a book so that ideas could spread. You had to learn how to read these books and you needed to know the information in them by heart so that you didn’t have to carry all the books around and look up things as they happened to you.
Survival and facts are fully automated now. We live in a safe place (for the most part) and all those books sit in our pocket. So why teach textbook topics for students to memorize? We need to abandon the past because we have created new systems that allow us to advance. So, let’s advance! Let’s focus in on skills like problem solving and collaboration, while using the textbook content to help teach this. Students, especially high school students, can be utilized to help solve real problems, and they will learn while they are doing this! A new goal of mine is to use my chemistry classes next year to turn Payton into an efficient, sustainable building via solar panels, composting, growing food in a garden, and waste management. It will likely take several years to develop and put this plan into action, but the students could learn chemistry through these tasks, and hopefully bring these ideas home with them to create a sustainable environment at home. A long-term goal would be to share this plan with teachers at other schools once I have it solidified.
I am planning on cutting down on extra-curricular activities that I help run in order to focus more on this goal, but also to begin to create a much more expansive PLN. I find that at the end of the day, I am unable to dedicate any time to reaching out to colleagues both within and outside of my school to share ideas and get feedback. Our cohort through MSU has been a great start, even if I am passively reading tweets from my peers. Their ideas motivate me and get me excited to try new things. I talk with friends who are in other professions to help give me ideas on what skills to work on and applications that we could use in the classroom. I’d like to work to include more teachers within Payton into my PLN, as well as professors at the college level to gain more access to technology and real world applications for chemistry.
Curated Resources to Support my Plan
Check out my Blendspace of resources that were specifically chosen to guide me in achieving my goals!
While reviewing my old goals and listening to Roselinde Torres talk about leadership, I can start to define what I am aiming to do with the chemistry curriculum and integrating PBL. It seems very clear to me that soon education will become something much different and much bigger than it has been in the past, and I am attempting to anticipate this change. Before civilizations were created, the children, who were not yet ready to work and hunt with the adults, needed to learn and practice skills necessary for survival. With advancements, this turned into the sharing and the memorization of knowledge and facts obtained from around the world and was put into a book so that ideas could spread. You had to learn how to read these books and you needed to know the information in them by heart so that you didn’t have to carry all the books around and look up things as they happened to you.
Survival and facts are fully automated now. We live in a safe place (for the most part) and all those books sit in our pocket. So why teach textbook topics for students to memorize? We need to abandon the past because we have created new systems that allow us to advance. So, let’s advance! Let’s focus in on skills like problem solving and collaboration, while using the textbook content to help teach this. Students, especially high school students, can be utilized to help solve real problems, and they will learn while they are doing this! A new goal of mine is to use my chemistry classes next year to turn Payton into an efficient, sustainable building via solar panels, composting, growing food in a garden, and waste management. It will likely take several years to develop and put this plan into action, but the students could learn chemistry through these tasks, and hopefully bring these ideas home with them to create a sustainable environment at home. A long-term goal would be to share this plan with teachers at other schools once I have it solidified.
I am planning on cutting down on extra-curricular activities that I help run in order to focus more on this goal, but also to begin to create a much more expansive PLN. I find that at the end of the day, I am unable to dedicate any time to reaching out to colleagues both within and outside of my school to share ideas and get feedback. Our cohort through MSU has been a great start, even if I am passively reading tweets from my peers. Their ideas motivate me and get me excited to try new things. I talk with friends who are in other professions to help give me ideas on what skills to work on and applications that we could use in the classroom. I’d like to work to include more teachers within Payton into my PLN, as well as professors at the college level to gain more access to technology and real world applications for chemistry.
Curated Resources to Support my Plan
Check out my Blendspace of resources that were specifically chosen to guide me in achieving my goals!