One of my personal values is to give all students the best opportunity I can for their learning. This is something that I demonstrate in my teaching by differentiating my instruction and the learning tasks I have my students do. In teaching a new concept, I make sure to include visual and audio instruction, as well as giving students opportunities to be hands on in their learning. This gives each student multiple opportunities to understand the concepts in ways that work best for their learning style.
Another value of mine is including nature and the outdoors in my teaching. Weather permitting, I like to bring learning outdoors and incorporate the land into my teaching. I grew up in a rural town, so being outdoors was a big part of my life growing up, and still is, so bringing these experiences to my students is something that is important to me.
My scholarly goals are not very high in the traditional sense. After being in university for seven years, I am definitely ready from a break in terms of being a traditional student. I may want to come back and do my master’s at some point, but that point will not be any time soon.
In a more broad sense, my goals mainly focus around gaining experience in the classroom. While practicum has prepared me in a sense, actually having my own classroom, or even just TTOCing and gaining knowledge of the district and different classroom dynamics, will be great for building my confidence as a teacher and my ability to make my lessons work well for all students, as well as just learning how to run a classroom on my own.