Sometimes I feel like summer is the only time that I have enough bandwidth to read up on best practices and go through professional development. I've always been someone who loves to learn. While some may feel that this is off contract hours, I find that it actually reinvigorates my love for teaching. It's nice to go at my own pace. If I want to do something like rent a book from the library about teaching or read up on how to organize the classroom, I can. If I don't want to, I don't have to. I love the freedom in that.
It's an interesting time in education too. I've been following a lot of the science of reading discussions. It's sometimes overwhelming since so many places and people just put SoR on their products.
Each year I pick one subject to be the focus for what I want to improve. Last year it was math. This year though I'm having a hard time deciding. I want to work on math, writing, and reading. But we are also going in on our 2nd year with our current science curriculum. This makes it still very new and the teammate in charge of science last year has decided to go to grad school.
Part of me feels that I didn't improve in math enough. I know our writing curriculum is not the best either. But I'm also curious to try the speech to print route of reading like in Reading Simplified or EBLI.
Does anyone else focus on one subject a year? If so, what are you focusing on?
