Future as a Learner

                              My Lifelong Teaching Vision
                                                           By Leisa Wall

As I am on the verge of finishing my Masters of Arts in Education, I am faced with the very loaded question, “What am I going to do now in regards to my education and my career?”  This is a question that educators are constantly facing as one door closes and another one opens.  This is where I see myself now, the door is closing on my masters degree as I finish it and the next one that opens is entirely up to me.  I have a set of goals that I would like to achieve and those include:

• Devote my energy and new learning from my masters to teaching fifth grade.
• Continue to learn about accommodations that can help my special education students succeed in my general education classroom.
• Teach fifth grade for at least the next few years.
• Continue to learn about more interventions that can help struggling students.
• Learn how to help struggling fifth grade readers.

One of the first things that I am excited about is focusing one hundred percent of my energy and brainpower on my classroom.  Until now, I have been balancing two very demanding things, being a classroom teacher and obtaining my masters degree.  It has felt like I have had two full time jobs.  I have been faced with teaching my third different grade level in three and a half years of teaching. Now that I will have more time, I will be able to fully devote myself to not only continuing to learn the entire fifth grade curriculum but I will be able to take already prepared lessons and enhance them.  I have only taught one other grade level for two years and that was first grade.  My second year of first grade went much better than the first year.  I felt more prepared and better able to understand what a first grade student was like.  This thought process helped me when I was preparing my lesson plans each week.  I am taking this idea of how my second year teaching first grade went and I am planning on doing the same next year in fifth grade, but with more time and energy. This year has proved to be really busy for me and I look forward to being able to devote more of my time and energy to my classroom.

I would also like to continue to focus on learning about accommodations for my special education students and how to help them succeed in my classroom.  Next year, I am going to have five cognitively impaired students mainstreamed in my classroom and I want each and every one of them to do well in the general education setting.  I plan on learning about each of these students by visiting their fourth grade classroom and attending their Individualized Education Plans (IEP) in the spring.  I want to learn what has been put in place for them that helps them succeed in the general education setting but also take that one step further and figure out ways that they can do well in my fifth grade classroom. 

One personal goal that I have for myself as I finish my masters is to stay in fifth grade for a while.  Being a younger teacher, unfortunately, I have been moved around a lot due to enrollment and budget issues.  It looks like I will be able to stay in fifth grade for the foreseeable future and I could not be more excited.  I have felt like a first year teacher three times in the past three and a half years.  As I look to the future, fifth grade is a good fit for me.  I really enjoy the curriculum as well as the age level of the students.  I plan on continuing to learn about fifth graders and seeing what they are capable of academically over the next few years. 

I would also like to learn more various interventions that can help struggling students.  At my school, I am the co-chair of the Student Study Team (SST).  This team helps teachers come up with interventions and behavior plans for struggling students.  I have attended many different Response to Intervention Workshops that have allowed me to learn about a variety of interventions and this is something that I would like to continue to do.  Learning about different interventions can help me suggest ideas to other teachers who have students that struggle and it can also help me with my own students.

Finally, I would like to learn more about struggling readers the in the upper elementary grades and how to help them.  One course that I took TE 842 Advanced Methods of Elementary Reading, focused on reading, specifically, on reading at the lower elementary levels.  Luckily, I have taught reading when I taught first grade.  I feel extremely prepared to teach a young student how to read but I am not sure what is best for upper elementary students in regards to how to best instruct struggling readers.  I have been able to apply and teach some of the strategies that I used with my first graders but I would like to learn more.  This seems to be the consensus among my upper elementary colleagues; we do not feel adequately prepared to help our struggling readers.  We have been talking about some professional development opportunities including workshops that we can attend that will help us teach reading better.  This is something that I am committed to doing.