Final Reflection

I feel my best in my classroom when I put my best effort into planning the lesson.  Some of my best lessons have come after late nights of prepping and planning.  The long hours definitely pay off and I can see that effort transfer to my students.  I feel best when I look around and I see students putting forth their best effort, demonstrating confidence and tenacity even when they struggle.  I feel best when I am surrounded by happy students that feel comfortable and prepared to complete their activities.  I feel best when a student comes to me for advice before taking tough situations into their own hands.  Test scores and grades are not indicative of my happiness with my class.  What really drives my passion and happiness is effort and growth.  I am at my best when I am allowing students to grow personally and academically.  My biggest success has been effectively making a home for my students in a really tough school, and successfully planning, implementing, and running a flexible seating environment in my classroom.  This project has been something that I am both very passionate about, and very excited to share with other teachers.  Many have expressed interest and are hoping to implement similar aspects in their own classroom.  I can always impact the environment in my own classroom, but what I truly want is all students, in every class to feel at home in their classrooms.  I am happy that my ideas are being used to move towards that goal.

The MAT program has provided so many resources and opportunities to get and share ideas that I feel like a stronger teacher and a better leader.  Especially for an online platform, the program was phenomenal at promoting and utilizing collaboration to allow for effective sharing of minds.  I feel like, by working in a collaborative cohort, we were able to grow together and grow stronger.  I really think that teaching full time for both years made the program even better in the long run, even if it felt like too much sometimes.  For the second year of classes, I was able to have a whole year of teaching under my belt, which made the MAT course content so much better for me. I was able to work with high quality and helpful professors, who brought professional expertise from their own positions in the field.  The quality of the people and the content within the program were top notch and I am so excited to take all of my new knowledge and use it to grow into the best teacher I can be.