It is that time of year again when many peo­ple make their New Year’s res­o­lu­tions.  Unfor­tu­nately, many of those res­o­lu­tions fail for a mul­ti­tude of rea­sons.  Two com­mon chal­lenges are that the goals are some­times unre­al­is­tic or there may be a lack of sup­port for the goals.  With those con­sid­er­a­tions in mind, I’ve cre­ated a list of pos­si­ble New Year’s res­o­lu­tions for edu­ca­tors along with pos­si­ble sup­port net­works for them. Change: Begin to replace out­dated or irrel­e­vant print mate­ri­als with more rig­or­ous online resources.

• Sup­port:  Don’t throw out all of the resources you cur­rently have.  It may be bet­ter to tar­get just one course, or only por­tions of a course.
• Sup­port:  Find another edu­ca­tor who teaches sim­i­lar con­tent and ask them to do the same thing and share resources with one another.

Change:  Cre­ate or expand your per­sonal learn­ing network.

• Sup­port:  Sched­ule a 15 minute block once each week to build your network.
• Sup­port:  Find some­one who has cre­ated a suc­cess­ful PLN to ask about rec­om­mended resources.  If you can find some­one with sim­i­lar inter­ests, that will be more helpful.

Change:  Imple­ment an online/virtual com­po­nent to a course that expands the learn­ing expe­ri­ence for stu­dents.  You could par­tially flip the class­room, bring in vir­tual guest speak­ers, or col­lab­o­rate with another class from a dif­fer­ent location.

• Sup­port:  Chat with another teacher at your school or else­where who has imple­mented some of these items.
• Sup­port:  Recruit stu­dents to help with the tech­ni­cal aspects of these items.

Change (Admin­is­tra­tor Spe­cific): Pro­vide spe­cific feed­back to teach­ers around the ways they are using technology.

• Sup­port:  Iden­tify an “expert” who can help you with your ini­tial walk-throughs.
• Sup­port:  Iden­tify a sim­ple, easy to under­stand vocab­u­lary that you can use to pro­vide feed­back.  Berna­jean Porter’s Spec­trum is a favorite of mine!

It cer­tainly isn’t real­is­tic or healthy to try to imple­ment all of these changes at once.  How­ever, these items by them­selves are things that can be imple­mented with some effort and com­mit­ment.  Good luck and Happy New Year!

Nick Sauers