Dear Parent (you will want to put the parent’s name here – be especially careful about last names and ensure that both parents have the same last name),

I am so excited to meet your child (put child’s name here)! My name is (put your name here). I have a lot of fun activities planned for the year and I can’t wait to get started! Some of the highlights that you can watch for this year include: (list a couple extra fun activities here that will show the parent that you are prepared and that their child will likely have a lot of fun in your class!).

(This paragraph is if you are new to the school – skip if not applicable!) I am new to you, so let me tell you a bit more about myself. (Here you want to tell them something that qualifies you for the job – where you got your degree from, what previous teaching experience you have, etc.)

(This paragraph gives you a chance to connect to the parents. You can tell them a couple things about you like the fact that you have 3 dogs or the fact that you love gardening. Refer to your school’s policy regarding this, but generally common sense is important – don’t tell them you’re seeking a masters with the hopes of a new career, or that you were hoping for fourth grade but that you’re sure that Kindergarten will be fine.)

Please let me know if you have any questions! I look forward to getting to know you and your child (use names for the kids!) this year!

(Note about contact information – provide what you are willing for parents to contact you with at any time of the day or night. If you don’t want parents calling your personal cell during your breakfast or after you’re in bed, don’t give it.)

Sincerely,

Your New Teacher! (Your name goes here!)

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Personal Goals Relating to Self and Relationships

It is important for teachers to consider themselves when thinking about goals. Improvement of self will lead to a healthier teacher who is better equipped both emotionally and physically to handle the myriad of challenges that come up each day. Improving professional relationships falls into this category as well, considering the fact that the better the working environment, the more focused the teacher will be.

Examples of Personal Goals:

• Have a more professional appearance.
• Remember to have fun and enjoy teaching.
• Stay positive even when things change.
• Form a better working relationship with cooperating teacher.
• Improve teacher-parent communication, with a focus on positive notes home.
• Build better relationships with team and other staff.
• Establish and maintain a classroom management plan.

Organization of Classroom and Materials

Staying organized in the classroom can be a challenge for even veteran teachers. If organization is a weak area, talk to other teachers who are better organized for tips on how they arrange things. The better organized the classroom and materials, the more efficient planning will be, resulting in better lessons. It is also useful to point out here that clutter and excess “stuff” does not make for a more educational classroom. Just because a particular supply is considered educational does not make it useful. Make a point to put unused materials in a box, then only keep those things that you have to get out of the box during the next month.

Examples of Organizational Goals:

• Organize filing cabinets by subject/theme.
• Put things away after using them.
• Plan ahead at least one week.
• Improve documentation for things that happen in the classroom.
• Keep up with grading.
• Collect more samples for student portfolios.
• Maintain two separate files for each child: a regular file for collection of student work, and a documentation file.
• Plan thoroughly, with a desired outcome in mind.
• Create curriculum notebooks. Keep a record of lessons/units and put together notebooks for each of the major themes in curriculum notebooks.
• Organize files by standard.
• Reduce classroom clutter.

Improve Quality of Lesson Plans

Improving the quality of the teacher’s lesson plans will not only produce a more well behaved classroom, but will result in greater student learning, and improved test scores. Making the effort to find areas to improve will be viewed positively by your principal and will help you to feel better about your teaching ability.

Examples of Lesson Improvement Goals:

• Incorporate literature into more lessons.
• Minimize wasted minutes – have extra stuff ready for downtime instead of the fall back of start your homework.
• Spend more time focusing on vocabulary and concept development.
• Introduce weekly learning journals.
• Implement two new strategies that you have learned.
• Incorporate more technology in the classroom.
• Prepare better substitute plans.
• Incorporate more state test practice through instruction and homework instead of cramming before the test.

When considering what professional goals to set, consider choosing one goal from each category: personal, organization and lesson improvement. Take time to set goals throughout the school year to ensure continued improvement all year long.

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At first I was thinking about how ludicrous it was to even consider a robot doing the multifaceted job of a teacher, and how much of a fit I would have as a parent about an object being responsible for the well-being of my child instead of a human being (another reason to homeschool?). Then I started thinking about the numbers comment.

It makes sense that we are so focused on test scores – that those numbers are the ultimate and end-all for how well a teacher is doing. We have no other easy to understand means of qualifying student achievement. It’s hard to argue with numbers. No matter how you look at it, a number means the same thing all the time.

It’s complicated to qualify achievement by capacity, though. What exactly is a child learning in class? How much does a child enjoy learning? How much does a child truly know? Does a child know how to find the information if he does not remember the answer? These things are difficult to quantify on a standardized test, yet these are more important than whether a child knows their times tables or can recite the states and capitals in alphabetic order.

When a teacher plans a lesson, the lesson objective (that which will be tested) is obviously the main goal of all the activities, but that is not all that is learned and it may not be the most important lesson to learn, even if that is what is written down. Learning to learn, learning to share, learning to cooperate and collaborate – these are also learned each time a child sits in class, and yet these are not tested.

So which is more important to you as a teacher? Teaching a child how to learn or teaching a child to regurgitate information for a test? It’s obvious which one is important to those responsible for education reform…

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This should be a wake-up call for many parents and teachers and even doctors.

First let me say that I firmly believe in presence of ADHD in a child which will render him or her incapable of doing well in school. I also firmly believe in the benefit of medications for helping control this behavior – I have seen with my own eyes a young boy who one day was incapable of sitting in his chair (he was often seen hanging upside down under his desk) and the next day coming to me with tears in his eyes because he finished his morning seat work for the first time ever.

But, I have also spoken to parents who have seen dramatic and almost unbelievable improvement in their child’s ADHD symptoms from removing a specific food group, usually gluten.

My point isn’t that something else is causing ADHD in kids, or that it is being over-diagnosed, but that parents and doctors should be looking to alternative causes of ADHD because in the case of gluten, for example, a food can cause a lot more damage than just to the behavior of a child. Don’t we want our children to be healthy? Not just have them sit quietly and do their work in class? Let’s start looking at alternative causes of these behavioral problems instead of relying upon a pharmaceutical system that may only mask symptoms.

No related posts.

Sharpening a pencil is not trivial. Grading stacks of paper, while tiring, is not a waste of effort. Lesson planning, assignments, all the paperwork, meetings and extra stuff you have to do each and every day is with one thing in mind – giving your students eternity.

The classroom is sacred ground. Every movement, word spoken and plan made and executed in the classroom has the potential to change a life forever.

“A teacher inspires students. A laptop can’t do that,” said Rita M. Solnet, a member of Parents Across America. That’s your job – to inspire. Pick one student this week – one student who needs inspiration and find a way to put a spark in his or her mind.

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Nearly 30% are considering quitting in the next 5 years.

More teachers are feeling that their position is not secure, and not surprisingly, less than half (35%) feel that they are adequately compensated for what they do.

One positive is that teachers say that the general public still respects them as teachers (just not politicians).

Even so, the most concerning thing is that almost half of all teachers surveyed felt that student achievement may not improve over the next five years.

That’s a lot of unhappy people who don’t feel like they can make a difference doing what they do best.

Ok, so there are a lot of bad teachers, but there are more good teachers.

The schools with the most budget cuts are those schools where discontent is the highest (surprise surprise!).

I don’t know, I kind of feel like this is similar to that Clorox commercial where the guy shows a bunch of socks and asks which one is whiter – come on, it’s obvious!

Why would any professional be happy if there were continued budget cuts year after year, each year more people being fired, being told what to do with greater and greater strictness by people who do not have any respect for what they do, making less in the process. Sometimes, a bad job is made bearable by increased pay… sometimes seeing a kid “get it” makes your day, but the more “junk” teachers have to deal with on a daily basis, with continued pay cuts and increasing negative comments from those in the position to make their lives miserable each and every day, the worse it will get… yeah, I can see how discontent would be rising…

That sock is white – can’t you see? Come on!

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In other words, if you want to learn how to do something, MentorMob may have all the best information available online already organized into steps for you, saving you valuable time and allowing you to skip straight to the learning aspect.

Meeting of the Minds

A unique aspect to this is that each playlist is not set in stone. Once a playlist is created, anyone who is signed in can edit by rearranging the steps, adding or deleting steps. An account with MentorMob is free and signing up is easy – you can do so with your facebook or google account, or by creating a separate MentorMob account.

Likewise anyone who is signed in can create a playlist. Creating a playlist is very simple. You simply fill in the information for each step as prompted and you’re all set.

Ok so the idea here is a great one – you want to create a lesson about something (say for example, photosynthesis) and you want to utilize all the free “stuff” available on the internet as a technology aspect to your lesson. So, you compile all the information in a playlist and there you have it. Only now say that there are 100 teachers who all want to do the same thing, so now, there are 100 teachers who are adding their web-knowledge to this one playlist, adding great resources and improving the entire lesson.

The drawback to this concept, though, is that this type of collaboration, when done for the purpose of creating a lesson plan for a specific date and time, is best done at a specific date and time, and not over the course of time, maybe, if at all.

So there are public editing permissions and private for each playlist that enable either the public (anyone with an account) or only the creator (you) to edit it. This takes care of the issue of your playlists being edited and sources deleted if you don’t want them to be.

Likewise, you can also give different viewing permissions to each playlist – either it is public (for anyone to see) or private, so that only those with the link can see it. There is also a Pro account option that allows you to invite specific users to have access to edit (great for grade level teams working together) and gives you analytics to see how people are interacting with your playlists, great for teachers assigning playlists to students.

Browsing and Learning with MentorMob

Ok, so you start browsing MentorMob for something to learn. There is an awesome visual component to each playlist, and a way to check off each step for those of you who thrive on list making. The options within each playlist include an outline of the steps, leaving comments/reviews and marking each step as completed with the “I know this” button. You can also save the playlist to your profile so that you don’t have to find it again later.

There is a community feature to MentorMob when you are signed in, as well. This will show you a recent activity list of everything anyone has just finished doing. You can click any user’s name and see their saved playlists, the playlists they have created, completed, etc. There is also a list of playlists under construction that they are hoping someone (you?) can improve. Nothing is private, so don’t try to learn something that you don’t want the rest of the community to know you’re learning.

Conclusions about MentorMob

MentorMob is an interesting idea that works very well.

Do I like it? Yes!

Will this revolutionize technology use for teachers? No, but it does provide an awesome resource for people looking to learn something new and a great way for teachers to incorporate technology into the classroom.

Check it out for yourself and see what you think! MentorMob.com

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And I should add, those who don’t, should be very careful about sharing their opinions. Kind of like people who criticize parents but have no kids themselves… you really need to walk a mile in their shoes before your opinion has any value.

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Why?

If there was no picture of “school” already, what would we create?

This is what Big Picture Learning did – they are a public school concept that has successfully recreated school and did away with classes, tests, and many of the common “school” molds.

Instead of trying to recreate the real world in a box, they get kids out into the real world, following their interests and passions. They have kids showing up to school every day and graduating. They are succeeding where standard public schools are not – in areas where kids don’t show up and don’t graduate.

Great! right? Yes, it is, but why are they succeeding and why is it the anomaly and not the norm? Why are more public schools not being made over with this type of model?

People are afraid of change, yes, and people are stuck in the idea that school has to be…. xyz.

People think that we all need to take Chemistry to succeed in life… but what if making all kids take Chemistry doesn’t work? What if to educate children and prepare them for the world that is reality, we need to take them out of a box and put them into reality?

What should school be? What would we create if there were no model in place already? It’s something to think about.

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2. More Education Cuts – 12th Grade?
3. Teachers Paid too Much or Valued too Little?

Free Math Mat Dowlonads thanks to F is for First Grade

Free Student book publishing  thanks to Student Treasures

Free touch math materials thanks to the School Bell

The Classroom Organizer virtual library thanks to Booksource

Check them out!

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