Goal Reflection Essay: A Look at my Personal Goals as an Educator and Learner
As I look back on my personal and professional goal statement for the MAET program I see a young teacher who wants to improve his craft and be a lifelong learner. I can group my initial goals into four main ideas. First, I stated that I wanted to become a more effective teacher in the classroom by continuing to grow and gain new strategies. Second, I wanted to understand the reasoning behind new strategies and technologies. Third, I wanted to learn how to integrate technologies into traditional instruction. Lastly, I wanted to simply become fluent with new technologies.
When I first applied to the MAET program I was in the middle of my third year of teaching. Still being fairly new, I was working on improving my instruction each and every day and I knew that technology was a great way to do so. I wanted to learn how to use new technologies and become fluent with them, and then share them with my students. I noted that I also wanted to understand why these technologies could be useful for classroom instruction and how to use them effectively. From the beginning I didn’t want to just use new technologies for the bells and whistles. I wanted them to serve a purpose and actually serve to help teach my students.
When I sit down and think about my current goals, I can honestly say that they are very similar. Being in my fifth year, I am finding that I am still striving to improve my instruction each and every day. I want to find ways to make my classroom more collaborative through the use of technology. Tools such as Google Docs have been on my radar for the classroom since they are a great way for students to share ideas together efficiently. Another current goal of mine is to find ways to teach my students to be completely technology literate. I am finding that most of my students simply don’t have very well developed computer skills. Things as simple as navigating a web browser and saving bookmarks are things my students need help doing. I am looking for efficient and meaningful ways to get my students where they need to be to use tech tools.
As I compare my initial and current goals, I am seeing many similarities. I still want to become fluent with new technologies and find ways to implement them in my classroom. I still want to understand the reasoning behind using them to ensure they are used correctly. I am still looking for ways to integrate technology as often as possible in my traditional instruction. One way that my goals have changed is that I am now more experienced and I am looking for new ways of doing certain things specifically. For example, I am now looking for collaborative tech tools instead of just any new tech tools. I have a better handle on my curriculum and where I want to go with my students, so my search for knowledge has narrowed and focused a bit, but I am still looking to grow as a learner and educator every day.