You Are an Artist

“If you work with your hands, your head, your heart and your soul, you are an artist.”

- St. Francis of Assisi

HANDS: When teaching my first graders, I think about teaching and learning with my hands by providing activities that are hands-on. Students are more engaged in their learning when they can use their hands to discover, create and problem solve. As a teacher, I use my hands to be creative and experiment. I try to provide my students with experiences to build and polish their problem solving and critical thinking skills.

HEAD: I am always using my head to think about what is best for my students. I differentiate my lessons to meet the needs of my students at all levels. I am constantly thinking about the whole student and what they need socially, emotionally, and academically. I adjust my lessons based off of their needs and emotions during the day. I remind myself about what is important at particular times of the day- it is important to get through the math lesson or address the bullying issue going on in the classroom? I am constantly asking myself what can wait and what is important. 

HEART: One of the main reasons I became a teacher is because of the love I have for helping and working with people. I truly love my job and look forward to making a difference in people's lives. I use my heart every day to show my students and families that I care about each person I work with. I put my heart into my work by understanding other's feelings and trying to help them. I also accept everyone for who they are and try to teach my students to treat everyone with respect and kindness. We celebrate our differences and use them to teach one another about who we are. I truly love teaching and am passionate about helping others learn and reach their full potential. 

SOUL: I put my soul into my career as a teacher. I chose this career to make a difference and feel a level of fulfillment in my life. I believe I am here to help others and what better way to do that than to teach. Each day I come to work with excitement and happiness to see and teach my students. I believe that I am an important role model for my students and want to inspire them to be the best person that they can be. I take this into consideration in everything I do. I know that my students are always watching me to learn. Teaching has truly fulfilled my life and I could not have found a better career to make me happy and give my life meaning.    

Reinventing Schools

After reading the article, Change as Collaborative Inquiry by Tony Wagner, I saw many connections to the problems we have in our schools today. The biggest connection I made was that our goals are usually "answer driven" instead of being based off of inquiry. Each year we have a list of about five things that are our district and school "improvement plan." When we have list of things set as our goals, we often touch briefly on each instead of taking the time to really improve one thing at a time. This also happens with initiatives we have going on each year. It seems it becomes a revolving door of trying one thing, then moving on before we master the first thing.


At my school we have a group of people that works on our school improvement plan each year. This group involves teachers from each grade level, specialists, administration, special education department, a paraprofessional, and a school board member. This group spends a day collaborating to come up with the school improvement plan for the year. The issues we face is that not everyone is a part of the process (only the group members) and that we usually have a list of about ten things in four different categories. In my opinion, that is a lot of goals to focus on in a year. Most of us teachers, do not refer back to this after getting the plan handed to us. What is the point of spending all of this time on a school improvement plan if we do not consistently reflect on meeting the goals?
As a staff, I think we need to limit our goals, so we can focus on mastering a few things over a period of time instead of trying to do it all at once. This will help us teachers focus on our goals and work at achieving them.

My action research that I have done throughout this masters program has allowed me to adapt my instruction and meet the needs of my students. I have set an individual goal for myself to focus on my math instruction and implementing guided math groups. Focusing on this one area has allowed me to spend time researching ideas, implementing different centers, and modify things that aren't working. I take time to reflect on my instruction and if it is successful and meeting the students needs. This allows me to adapt on a daily basis. This change has been a positive implementation in my classroom because the students are learning in a variety of ways (groups, partners, individual), are making choices for their learning, and are learning through hands on with manipulatives, games, etc. The students are also getting a chance to redo their work to show their progress, as they learn at different rates. This change was implemented to be more like the "real world" where you make mistakes, learn from them and try again. I want my students to know that they can learn and do things, but they might not be there quite "yet."