Friday, May 25, 2012

A New Classroom, A New Adventure

My name is Jeffrey Phillips. Welcome to my blog.

As we approach June, I've started to reflect on the last year in the classroom. My soon-to-be wife, Amanda, and I moved to Kuwait from Canada last September to start working at an Ontario curriculum based school. In the next few weeks our year will close out and we will fly back to Canada for the summer. We will be back again in August to start our second full years as teachers. This year has been a big learning experience, as I imagine the first year is for every teacher. Even as exams approach I am thinking of things I want to do differently next year, things I want to change slightly, and things I want to research over the summer.

Part of the reason I am starting this blog is to monitor my own professional progress and to reach out to like-minded professionals. I have survived my first year as an English and Art teacher for grades 6, 7, 8, and 9. Next year I will only teach English for our grade 8s, 9s, and 10s. I'm already formulating a plan of attack for next years curriculum, and the more research I do the more interested I become using a game concept based methodology. I'm not necessarily talking about using games in the classroom, rather I am interested in using the ideas and tropes found in most games in my year, unit, and lesson plans. I want to incorporate the interest that kids have in playing games into the lessons I teach them.  I want to change the way I'm doing assessment.

I have a lot of big ideas, and over the course of the summer I plan to develop them extensively. My progress, research, and insight will be blogged about consistently (I hope). Technology is changing the way we educate our kids; this is the new classroom.

That's all for now.

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