My Current Professional SMART GOALS

Inquiry Question: How can I keep the children engaged and interested in the day to day learning activities so they participate and learn from the experience?

Goal #1: I will support the children in staying engaged in the class learning experiences by incorporating play, movement and opportunities for children to actively participate to keep them focused and interested from beginning to end.

Objective: I will plan and implement activities that are split in short interactive segments that include visuals, movement, and hands on materials.

Objective: I will observe the children’s interest and engagement level in the activities to reflect if it's going well or not, and I will make in the moment adjustments or modifications if needed to re-engage the children.

Inquiry Question: How can I take more responsibility as an educator for monitoring and ensuring child safety, while taking action to keep the space safe and healthy?

Goal #2: I will monitor child safety by completing regular environmental scans, conducting regular head counts during transitions and outdoor play, and ensuring materials and activities are developmentally safe and meet safety standards while promoting safe play practices. 

Objective: I will scan the environment and complete a head count right after each transition.
Objective: I will observe what the children are doing while checking for safety hazards and ensuring safe play behaviours in the children.

Inquiry Question: How can I take more initiative, while being less reliant on instruction and scaffolding from my mentor, to independently manage classroom responsibilities?

Goal #3: I will take on a stronger teaching role by independently responding to children’s needs, managing transitions, modifying learning experiences as needed and confidently managing classroom routines without immediate direction from my mentor teacher. 

Objective: I will manage classroom routines and make decisions to take action when I know it's time to transition into the next thing without waiting for a reminder from my mentor.
Objective: To ensure I am progressing and growing more independent I will do a check in with my mentor after 4 weeks to confirm whether there is progress.

Final Goal Reflection

As I reflected on what goals I wanted to set for this placement, I began with 3 inquiries, which led to my three goals mentioned above. Since I was coming back to my placement for a second time in the winter semester I knew that I needed to take more initiative in the class with managing transitions, and classroom routines so I decided to focus on this.

Throughout the term I was pushing myself to gain confidence in myself and viewing myself as an equal partner in the classroom. This helped me take the initiative I needed. Slowly I didn’t wait for instruction from my mentor to tell me to do something, instead I started doing things on my own, for example reminding children the morning routine when we enter the class. I started to take more responsibility for ensuring child safety in the class and this worked with my overall initiative taking goal.

In the past there was a situation where a child ran away from the group and was heading towards an open door. I froze and expected my mentor to respond and go after the child. After the situation, my mentor approached me and gently reminded me that when a situation puts a child’s safety in jeopardy we must act fast and not worry if “that's part of my job or not”. This situation was difficult for me, I asked myself "Why didn't I go after the child?" and I felt pretty disappointed in myself as an educator. This experience was a big reason towards my goal of ensuring child safety, and I've been able to learn since then. 

Reflecting on many situations I’ve been able to step in when things in the class environment weren’t at safety protocols and I’ve been able to greatly improve in this area. When planning activities I began planning and consulting with my educator more. I was able to bring much more engaging, hands-on experiences for the children which really got them engaged and interested which allowed for increased participation. The children especially loved the “does it dissolve” experiment, and the "light projector" experience because they all got to observe and manipulate the materials to see the effect of it in a scientific way. Through reflection and feedback from my mentor I can say I’ve definitely achieved my goals, and I’m looking forward to setting more goals, and gaining more growth and knowledge from my next placement!