It was very timely because I recently completed my mid-year reflection on my own professional goals and had a meeting with my director, Denise O’Brien, to discuss them. As I reflected on my goals, I referred to my “action plan” or “timeline” that I use to document my progress. Catlin’s blog post had me thinking about the Google Doc I use for this and how it is certainly like making a “documentary!”
Any great film, whether it is a documentary or a fun movie, starts with a storyboard. Every year we define our professional goals and submit them to our directors, along with the timeline and action steps we plan to take to help us succeed. This planning is essentially our storyboard! My professional goals sometimes involve a new skill certification or collaborating with a colleague on a new project, but most often they center around learning more about something that will help me be a better educator and ESU 10 employee. This means learning! But setting the goal and writing the plan, or storyboard, is the first step.
Denise, our T&L Director, has guided us when we choose our goals and determine how we can meet them. In her blog post, Catlin Tucker writes that students should reflect on the following:
•What am I learning? Why am I learning this? How is this relevant to my life?
•What am I understanding? What is confusing? What resources do I have access to if I need support?
•How am I learning? Which strategies or resources are working best for me?
•In what areas am I demonstrating significant growth? In what areas am I struggling •to make progress?
•What “ah-has” or realizations am I having? How are those moments impacting my thinking?
I would venture to say that this is exactly what Denise has been having the T&L Department members do when we are writing our goals and completing our mid-year and end-of-year reflections! We answer those same questions that Catlin proposes students should address.
In her writing, Catlin goes on to say that students can use multimedia tools to capture their learning in their “documentary.” While I am using a Google Doc to write my “storyboard” and reflections, I can also add pictures or artifacts to it in order to further document my progress and learning. There is that word “document” again! Just like students can treat their learning like they are making a documentary, so can we!
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1https://catlintucker.com/2021/08/learning-documentary/