I’m excited about the year to come in my school district. The past couple days have been Institute-type days. On Thursday we met as a district and as a school later, and the focus of both meetings was the idea that this year we are focusing on improving instruction. For a few years now the district has been putting together curriculum maps (which I greatly benefited from last year) and putting new software like Mastery Manager into place. Now, most maps are made, and we can focus on making those maps work in the classroom.

The biggest change in our district for this year is directly related to improving instruction. Every Monday we are going to start an hour late, and we are going to have meetings. Often our meetings will be in Course Learning Teams, groups of teachers who teach the same class. In these teams we will be attempting to discuss what we do in the classroom, and how it needs to change to help our students. We are going to use Mastery Manager to analyze data, share ideas and strategies, and come up with specific goals for our team.

If people take this seriously and are committed to the process, I think course learning teams could be very beneficial. I would love to get ideas from people and come up with specific plans that we want to try. I like the idea of analyzing data so we can help a greater number of our students succeed. I took a class on course learning teams this summer through the district, and they outlined clear steps that we can take to accomplish what we want to accomplish. It will be a big change, and I think I personally could benefit like crazy from such a reflective and goal-oriented process.

I’m a little worried people might not take it seriously, and our meetings might end up being just gabbing sessions. I don’t want that to happen. Even though I am just a second-year teacher, I’m really going to try to stop that as best I can. I’m fairly tactful, so maybe I’ll be able to redirect conversation in a friendly way. I just don’t want to waste this opportunity we’ve been given to get better at what we do.