Well if Taylor Swift can bring about new popularity to an age old word like “goals” by putting a hash tag and squad in front of it (ICYMI, just google #squadgoals) while posting group photos with her beautiful girl gang, I’m going to start a new trend. Well I am definitely no T-swift, but I’d like to revive the idea of having #teachergoals because it’s the beginning of the school year. And who doesn’t love being able to create new goals, says the achiever in me.

As I start my thirteenth year of my teaching career, in case you are wondering I was only 13 when I started teaching (obviously), I always look forward to the endless possibilities that await me with a fresh new class of students on the first day of school. Deep down, my main teacher goal every year is to the best teacher ever, but I guess I do need to make more concrete teacher goals for myself. I really do try to push myself to be an even better teacher then I was the year before. It’s kind of the rule of teaching that you get better each year. I’ve definitely seen growth when I reflect on my practice and then make concrete goals to improve.

Now that I’m becoming a veteran (but still young at heart) teacher, I realize you need to push yourself even more to become better. It’s easy to get better in the first few years, but you have to keep challenging yourself to keep learning and improving, because once you have your bag of tricks that allows you to keep your students on task, quiet, and respectful it’s easy to get stagnant. At the end of the day, are you just good at classroom management or are you truly a great teacher? Are you really growing a genuine community of learners? Are you really differentiating and allowing for inquiry to happen? So I’m always reading new teaching books, blogs, articles and attending workshops to make sure I’m learning and growing. (I recently discovered this great teaching blog: cult of pedagogy)

So this year, I have a few teacher goals swirling around my mind.

• Be better at giving more effective and timely feedback to my students. I totally had that biology teacher in high school that would take months to return that test, and I always wondered why it took so long. Well now that I’m a teacher, I totally understand how that’s possible. I’m giving myself a week at most to return something. Yes, it’s going to be difficult when the essays get longer and the tests get longer, but I know I can do it.

• To improve my conferring note-taking system, so that I can be more effective in giving feedback (see goal #1) and be more reflective on where my students need help. For the past few years I decided to go digital with my conferring notes for reading and writing workshop. I used Evernote app on my ipad and it was good.  However, it wasn’t great and it wasn’t meeting all of my needs. So this year, this techie teacher went back to good old paper and I’m loving it so far. I created my own conferring notebook for reading workshop and writing workshop with colorful tabs and they are goal focused. It’s pinterest worthy and I’ll have to do another post with photos on it later!

• To really push and challenge my students that already have gotten the concepts. As a teacher, you are usually focused on meeting the needs of the students that don’t get the concepts, which is great, but often the students that already have gotten the concepts don’t get challenged or pushed. Often times, those students get a menu of more busy work. So, I want to make sure that I’m really appropriately challenging those students as well. If you have any suggestions or resources, please leave a comment!

Ok, so even if I don’t start a new internet trend, please share with us some of your teacher goals for this new school year through your blog/facebook/twitter/instagram/snapchat and make sure to include #teachergoals. I would love to hear what your goals are!