Here at Bayer CropScience, employees keep development dialogues. This is essentially the educator’s PDP except that it is updated on a weekly basis and employees have conversations with their supervisors every other week in regards to goals. I’ve really come to appreciate this system and wonder what education could be if administrators had time to meet regularly with individual teachers to help with their development instead of the standard two or three times each year. While the meetings are not long, I see frequency as key for accountability purposes.
It will be interesting to see how well I keep up with this as school starts. I’ve already started thinking, dreaming, and planning some goals for the upcoming school year (one reason I love the summer break from school) and want to track them on weekly basis. In the development dialogues goals are planned and managed short-term (~6 weeks out), mid-term (6 months-year), and long term (five and ten years out). As a Kenan Fellow I am able to fully participate in this process and have been able to see some clear connections between my goals here and #teacherlife.
Bayer has a program called Making Science Make Sense (MSMS) that is coming up on its 20th anniversary. It is a community outreach program in which Bayer employees use their volunteer hours (every employee has a set number of volunteer hours he/she can use each year) to visit schools and conduct short, highly-engaging experiments in addition to explaining careers with Bayer. Employees have a list of experiments to choose from or they can make up their own ideas based on the needs of the teacher. Many employees opt to use one of the experiments. Right now there are not any experiments/lessons that are directly related to biotechnology in the database. It creates an interesting visit for any CropScience employee because the introduction he/she gives about his/her position and work is not related to the science that takes place after the introduction. This is where Stacey and I come in. We are using our experiences at Bayer to create MSMS materials that can be used by CropScience employees. I’m really loving this collaboration opportunity because it is such a natural way for us, as teachers, to work in this unique hybrid school-industry position.
As a teacher in a small, rural district we have little to no established common curriculum across the district (and for science you can forget anything for kindergarten-fourth grade) at the elementary level. Like everyone else, I spend a significant amount of time outside of school grasping for new ideas and not only researching for specific lesson plans and topics, but also learning about curriculum design however I can. I find it fascinating.
I love the openness of curriculum design, but most of all the challenge and subsequent reward when I am able to take that large elusive abstract concept, scale it down to a specific topic, and have students take away something concrete and meaningful. But let’s not get carried away here…most days it feels like 90% challenge, 10% success (and that’s if you consider it from the right perspective). It’s funny though how the 10% success can wipe away the frustrations of the challenging 90% in no time.
That also seems to be the very nature of being a teacher, not just curriculum and planning, am I right?