The Midpoint

Today officially marked the end of the first half of the school year.  I think that it has finally set in that this is my classroom.  Over winter break a few weeks ago, I found myself excited to go back to my classroom and students.  Now that we have been back for the last few weeks, I have finally felt a bit more settled in for the year.  I feel like I know my students well and I know ways that I can support them in the classroom to help them learn the most they can.

As part of being this far into the school year, I am deep into my first year resident educator work (a mentorship program required for four years to earn a full five year teaching license).  At this point in the year I have to plan, conduct, and reflect on three lesson cycles (mini units).  I have fully completed one entire cycle and have been so thrilled with the deep learning that all of my students have had.  I have been even more thrilled with how much my more challenged students have not only learned but retained.  It was a definite proud teacher moment.  :-)  This has really inspired me to continue this work with the remainder of my math instruction this year.  The only challenge: it was a lot of prep work and planning.  I want to do this, but I am not sure where I am going to find the time on top of my already busy schedule with all of my other job to dos.  I am going to have to get super creative.

To mark the end of the first half of the school year, my team had a release day to work on data review and planning from here.  I was so happy that we completed so much work and planning.  We created an assessment to continue to track student growth and planned a series of 8 lessons that we will conduct as a team in the 8 weeks leading up to our state testing.  Today was so productive and I have a work day again tomorrow.  I am hoping that tomorrow can be just as productive.

I certainly did not think that I would be feeling this calm at this point in my first year teaching full time. I certainly did not think that I would have been learning so much this year either.  If you had asked me at the start of the school year if I thought I would grow a lot as a teacher and learn a lot about being a better teacher, I would have said no, but I am finding that I am a much better teacher than I ever was 4.5 months ago.  I cannot wait to see what the next half of the year brings!