It is amazing to think that I am at the end of my eighth year as a classroom teacher and as I reflect on this academic year, knowing that my role is going to be changing in the future. When I started thinking about my goals at the start of this academic year, I would never have been able to imagine that this is where I would be.
Over this school year, I started to work with Bill Fishell on a group 3 application looking at family engagement in student learning. The focus of our work was to try and come up with resources for families around the shifts in education and in our school at Peoples Academy Middle Level around proficiency-based learning and Act 77. Our hope was to develop some classroom resources and routines for engaging families in sharing student work and encouraging conversations about learning at home.
This year we really focused on developing our action plan, and gathering resources, although we never were able to really put our plan into action. We did have a great meeting with Karen discussing the needs of our community and the parents and families that we are serving and it is my hope that next year part of my work is going to be around parent involvement and communicating shifts in learning with parents. I still feel this is an area that is going to need work on next year, thinking about we communicate with parents and the purpose of those communications, for example, if we are using progress reports, how can we make this more meaningful, for example having students show an example of work and answer questions with parents or have students during progress report time write a letter to parents about what they are learning about and their goal progress. I do feel that this is hard work to accomplish by one member due to the time needed for students and all teachers having the same communication expectations.
