My fellowship has really provided me with a much more specific outlook as a physics educator. I say specific because physics is a broad subject and the content covers many topics across all courses in high school so it is easy to have a general outlook. This specific outlook is focusing on making my content relevant. This is quite easy for physics, but as I have detailed in previous blog posts, it can also be easy to assume that you’re making the content relevant. I want to focus on having my students look for the bigger picture. If I can miss the forest for the trees from time to time, it is safe to assume that my students can also make those mistakes as well. This experience has really made me notice how many connections you can make to my content and with only a little extra effort those connections can make a vast difference for my students’ understanding.

This fellowship has continued to present me with new resources, friendships, and ideas for my classroom. I feel as though I have a better understanding of myself as an educator and am more confident about this upcoming school year. This year, my communication levels with parents and students will be increased. I have always spent a lot of time working on communicating more with parents, but I think I just needed help finding ways to communicate better. I will be using twitter more efficiently and will connect all of my websites (twitter, schoology, class site, remind etc) together to cover more bases in terms of communicating in the easiest way possible for parents. This one change should help keep my classroom more community oriented as well as help with forming relationships with my students.

I have always tried to make my content interesting for my students and my entire Kenan Fellowship experience has reinforced that ideal/goal for me. Everyone has provided me with ideas and support as I worked through my curriculum product and professional development experience. It is truly special to have a network of teachers who all have similar ideals and goals that I can turn to for help and support.