From Me to We
A Change in Personal Goals
By: Amber LaPerriere
Upon entering my third year of teaching at a Title I school I decided furthering my education was the next step in bettering myself as an elementary teacher. At the time I had just finished another tough year with another tough class. This caused me to take a closer look at my career, students, and my school district. From this I concluded that there were an extreme number of students who were not reading proficiently. Not only did I feel this way but I was also hearing staff within my school talking about the difficulties of literacy in their classrooms as well. When I applied for my masters I made it my goal to help increase the proficiency of the kids in my school district by focusing on literacy within the Master’s of Arts in Education (MAED) program online.
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My goals further discussed how I wanted to learn more about the history of reading in low-income schools as well as the future and how I could make a difference. Particularly I talked about wanting to ensure every child in the State of Michigan is not lagging behind in literacy so that when they reach higher education, the children are primed for success.
Since then my goals have changed and stayed the same since furthering my education. Throughout the program I learned to understand and create a plan for a struggling reader with a group of other teachers. I learned new aspects of what literacy is through book clubs and class discussions within our community of teachers as students. Overall, I learned that it is not just about what I can do, but what a community can do together to reach a common goal.
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No two years in teaching is the same. Every year brings new students, new data, and new ways of doing things. This includes teaching literacy, which means my goal will never change but my approach with always be evolving. Every year I continue to search for new ways of reaching my students in order to get all of them where they need to be within literacy to be successful. My literacy goal has not changed, what has changed for me since my original goal is the use of the word I. My new goal focuses on the way I want to increase reading proficiency. I now understand that to improve literacy you must create a community of teachers to work together to bring change. My goal is to work as a team of teachers to discuss what we can do for our struggling readers. I want to engage in book clubs and learn new ways of doing things together. I want to move from me to we by creating a community of teachers who work together to ensure every child today and in the future are successful within literacy to help them reach a higher education successfully. I want to create the same community of teachers as learners that I was able to be apart of within my Master’s of Arts in Education program.
