For this week’s blog we were tasked with writing about our biggest challenge and success in creating educational resources relating to our internship.
CHALLENGE
The biggest personal challenge was to ensure that I didn’t duplicate effort. Working collaboratively with PLCs has become a way of life at our school (at least in the math department). The Fellow with whom I was working, however, had never really worked with PLCs (she’s been the only 7th grade math teacher at her school for many years), and she wasn’t comfortable using a co-development process. The limited number of standards to which our project applied made it difficult to come up with separate topics, yet we decided to work independently – that was a challenge, that I’m proud to say, we were able to overcome. Ultimately, we ended up with more lessons in a shorter time span, so it all worked out for the best!
SUCCESS
My biggest personal success was developing the core process model for the eMammal project. Early on, I was having trouble figuring out how all of the many pieces of eMammal fit together, so I took some time to create a flow map (see “You Get What You Give…”). This map provides the foundation from which all other lessons can grow, allowing teachers across the State of NC and beyond, to share their eMammal curriculum.