Summer 2024 had many ups and downs for me. I traveled on an epic adventure through several US national parks, made friends with some of the best classmates, a visit to the lake, reconnected with friends and family, celebrated my best friends engagement, and so much more. This was also the summer of loss and it has profoundly changed me in a lot of ways. Overall, this summer was incredible and I have made lots of memories, but as they say "all good things come to an end" and summer is definitely coming to an end.
I am starting to see teacher's posting their new classroom decor and set ups and it definitely got my attention that it is back to school in just a few short weeks. With the new Science TEKS many science teachers are nervous, but I have seen an outpouring of support for each other. Teachers in my Facebook learning community pages (especially the Texas Science Teacher page) are sharing resources, brainstorming ideas, offering free mini-PD videos to help teachers become more familiar with tech tools or online curriculum programs and it is just amazing to see, especially after everything I have learned in my ADL program at Lamar University. Leadership comes in many forms and sharing knowledge is a powerful tool that educators are so willing to go above and beyond to share and help each other. Almost every educator I have come across has a wealth of knowledge and resources that they are not only willing to share with you, they are excited to do so. This is pretty rare in most other professional communities.
As I reflect on my contributions to my learning community this summer I noticed that I am thinking about leadership in a new frame of mind and that I have gained a completely new appreciation for the wealth of resources educators will share with each other as we all innovate and create things to make an impact on our students. I have learned a lot about leadership, but I have learned more about myself. I have gotten to know my strengths and celebrate them in new ways, like submitting an article to be published and I have gotten more clarity on my weaknesses thanks to the gentle nudges of this program to get out of my comfort zone and push myself for excellence. I am still working on those weaknesses, but I now have a lot more tools in my arsenal to attack those weaknesses as I progress through the rest of the program and my career.
In 5304 I learned valuable skills pertaining to leadership and no surprise to me building relationships is one of the best things you can do to influence change within an organization and team. While I knew relationship building is important in the way I relate to people and the way I personally influence others, I had no idea it is a foundational skill every leader must have. However, crucial conversations and how to facilitate them is an area where I know I need to do some intentional self-reflecting and practice. Leaders not only care about their people, they push them to do the best they can and be the best version of themselves even when it is difficult to do. While I am still not ready to "take the bull by its horns" as they say, I am no longer firmly believing that I was meant to be more of a supporting actress to someone else's major role. I believe that I can influence change and truly become an effective leader. Change must be practiced every day with a clear plan in mind, but as long as you stay focused on that and keep healthy, positive relationships with your team the sky is the limit for the change you can achieve.
Throughout this course I participated in the discussions timely once I got caught up from what I thought was a severe case of food poisoning setting me back a little. I completed every assignment on time and put 100% effort into each one. Even while I was sick I was able to keep up with the reading for the course and I thoroughly enjoyed reading the books even though I thought they would be the least interesting thing to read. I enjoyed reading my peers' responses on the discussion posts and I found that I learned a lot from the posts. Reading about the experiences and opinions of my peers was really interesting to me and helped me create some really interesting connections about the leadership skills we are learning in class to my own life. It is crazy the amount of different perspectives that can come out of reading one book! I think I did some of the best work of my life in this course and I am very proud of everything I have been able to do in this course.
5317 was a very different course experience for me because it was essentially a workshop for writing an article for publication. As I was learning about how to become an effective leader and influencer of change in 5304, I was actively working toward that end goal with my article. I turned my passion for creating a blended learning community within my classroom into a movement just be writing an article that I feel will call other educators to action. My article doesn't oversell or over complicate blended learning, it only gives educators resources that I found wildly successful in creating authentic, engaging learning for my students. I give my resources to educators while explaining that blended learning isn't one size fits all, it is personal and unique to each situation. You can incorporate aspects of digital learning while keeping the aspects of traditional learning that work best for you. Digital learning doesn't have to be complicated to start out, but you will be able to see the benefits immediately. Students don't want to be talked at by you they want to connect with you and make meaningful connections to their community and their surroundings.
While my article vision is very clear now, it was not at the beginning. My outline was very broad to start with. I knew that I wanted to create something that was "bite-sized" and easily digestible to all educators regardless of their current comfort zones involving technology, but how do you take hours of work developing and researching a topic and make it bite-sized? That was my struggle when writing my first draft of my article.
Luckily, through the peer review process and constant support and bouncing ideas off of a few of my lovely colleagues: Samara Marin, Rose Rayner, Amburh Richard, Mia Fayerweather, and others, I was able to scrap the original layout of my article and start again. To accomplish what I wanted to accomplish, I didn't need to write a how-to guide. I needed to write an article about how to get started. I needed to simplify the process and let the rest of the blended adventure happen naturally for my readers. My article inspires others to try out blended learning and empowers them to implement the strategies in their classes at their own pace. I am so thankful that this course forced us to open up to each other and really look at each others' projects and ideas, because it created a strong community in which we were able to build off each others ideas, strengthen our own ideas and opinions, and we learned from each other a ton the last half of the course. I don't think I have ever been in such a supportive online chat room like teams for a course before and I definitely have not experienced such an engaging and enriching course chat like this before. Not only did I learn a ton about the publication process as a whole, I learned how to actively engage in a learning community and how to give feedforward to help my peers, so that we all learn a lot more and spark creativity in each other. This was a very powerful learning experience for me because I had great teammates.
I can honestly say that this is the most I have ever participated in any class that I have taken (face-to-face and online included). I participated in every discussion post, turned in all my work on time, I edited several assignments for higher grades, and sought feedback and ideas from my peers as well. During the peer review process I had to come out of my introverted shell a lot in order to get the required number of peer reviewers. After that gentle nudge to become less shy and more actively engaged with my peers. In the past I have been pretty reserved and only really talk to a few acquaintances in each class. I have never learned so much from a single class either and I know that this outcome is purely due to the fact that I put in a lot of effort into this class and I engaged with my peers in a way that I haven't previously.
In conclusion, I have worked really hard this summer to overcome personal and academic struggles. I have found a new level of success and I am really happy with what I have been able to accomplish. While my innovation always seemed like an admirable dream, it wasn't feeling real or truly attainable until now. I have a pretty good idea of what I want my project to look like at the conclusion of this program's capstone project course. This has been one of the most fulfilling summers I have had in the midst of a mini personal disaster. I know that this summer is going to be a key defining moment in my life time and I am so grateful for the opportunities I have had.
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