Jessica Thimm
5th Grade Teacher
Life-Long Learner
Why Am I a Life-Long Learner?
When I first started completing my Master of Arts in Education through Michigan State University, I thought of it as something I needed to get done to progress in teaching. I knew I needed to complete my Masters before the time expired and I was not overly excited to get started; I honestly thought about it as just more work I needed to do. I spent hours thinking about choosing my concentration and talked with other teachers in my school. Most of them asked me “if you’re not in the classroom, what do you see yourself doing?” I thought about it and decided to select literacy as my concentration. I still wasn’t overly excited about taking the journey to complete my Masters.
Once I started looking over courses and selecting what I wanted to learn, I realized there were a lot of courses that were interesting to me. I decided to pick courses that I felt would benefit me since they were parts of teaching I felt a lack of experience with. A couple classes I took happened at the perfect time. Either I was dealing with an issue in my own classroom and felt completely overwhelmed or felt very lacking in that subject or area. I really enjoyed my learning these past few years and feel that I have really grown in my teaching and understanding. Because of this, I have realized that I will always be a lifelong learner. There are so many areas of teaching that I still feel lacking in or need additional help in that I feel the need to continue my own personal education.
During my undergraduate, I initially thought I wanted to be a middle school science teacher so I took many science courses, so much that I did not have many electives. After completing my internship in third grade, I realized I loved my experience in elementary school and then took a job as a fifth grade teacher. I currently work in Fairfax County Public Schools right near Washington D.C. I work in one of one hundred and forty-two elementary schools throughout the county. Each year I have had close to thirty students in my class from all over the world. My first year, I was completely overwhelmed. I was doing everything I could to keep my head above water and learn the curriculum. After my first year, I thought about the things I wanted to improve in my own teaching such as areas I felt I lacked experience in or content I didn’t feel that prepared for. I decided to pick my courses based on my personal experience and what I felt would benefit me the most and not on what seemed like an easy class. I really wanted to gain experience with special education and English as a second language students because I had these students in my class and did not feel fully prepared to teach them.
Two courses throughout my graduate degree have really stood out to me and changed the way I approach teaching in my classroom. These two courses are TE 846: Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners and CEP 823: Educating Students with Challenging Behaviors. Both courses made me focus on my student(s) and what their needs are. I really had to dive deep into how they learn, what strategies work for them, and what that looks like in a classroom with twenty-five or so other students. I was able to create and implement academic goals and behavior plans to help the different needs of my students whether it was special education, ESOL, or a specific content area. These two courses also occurred during a time I was dealing with something that directly related to the big ideas of the classes.
After my first year of teaching, one area I really felt I needed to improve was my literacy instruction. I felt like I had so many different students and wasn’t doing enough to reach all of their needs. The first course I took after starting my Masters was Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners. The course could not have come at a better time and really helped my confidence in teaching language arts as well as cultivating my excitement into furthering my learning. Through this course, I was able to discuss with other peers about the strategies they use in their own classrooms and try some of them in my classroom. I was also able to assess and plan for a wide range of literacy learners. One thing that was really beneficial for me was being able to focus on a specific student in my classroom. I was experiencing my first English Language Learner and was quite lost. This course assisted me into understanding how to instruct English language learning students. I assessed her motivation, reading fluency, and comprehension and interpreted the data to create a lesson plan. In the lesson plan, I made sure to include things that would be helpful when teaching an ESOL student like highlighting new vocabulary and providing pictures /background knowledge for common words they might not know. By doing this, I really had to concentrate on how my student learned best as well as what problems or misconceptions an English learning student might have. This course forced me to look at my own teaching and think about how I could make sure to reach all different learners in my classroom. I always knew I had to use a wide range of strategies but putting it into practice was something I did not fully comprehend until I was in the classroom. This course also helped me to realize that my students would be the most successful when I focused of how they learn and their own personal needs.
During the 2014 – 2015 school year, I was really having a hard time with a specific student in my classroom. I was dealing with very aggressive behaviors such as inappropriate verbal outbursts, throwing of different objects, and parents who were not being helpful to the things we were trying at school. It was during that time that I really started to think if teaching was the right choice for me. I took a semester off of working towards completing my Masters because I was way too overwhelmed as well as being emotionally and physically drained. In the spring, I convinced myself to take a course to develop my education further. I decided to take Educating Students with Challenging Behaviors and it was the best decision I could have made. During this course, I took the work I was already doing and was able to meet and discuss with other graduate students about similar experiences and what they would do. I looked into outside factors that could be influencing my student like family life, their upbringing, previous schooling, and interactions with other people. I created a behavior plan, tried it out, tweaked it when it was needed, and then created another plan. While doing all this, I was constantly interacting with my peers and getting their advice into different things to try and what worked or didn’t work for them. By taking this course, I was actually able to find out that my student was mislabeled and ended up creating my first Crisis Intervention Plan and updated his Individuated Education Plan. After doing all this work, I was able to separate the student from their behavior instead of associating the student as their behavior. Like TE 846, this course, CEP 823, reinforced the idea that my students’ needs had to be the center of my teaching in the classroom.
When you decide to apply for the Master of Arts in Education degree you have to select a concentration. I was stuck between choosing a math concentration or a literacy concentration. In the end, I decided to pick literacy because I could see myself using the degree to become a reading specialist, librarian, or literacy instructional coach. Thankfully, Michigan State University requires you to take a class from another concentration. I was able to focus on literacy for my concentration but also gain some knowledge in math instruction. I was really intrigued by the course CEP 805: Learning Math with Technology. In Virginia, our standardized state testing is 100% online and has ‘technology enhanced items.’ I found that many students did not have a lot of practice with these questions but there were not a lot of resources available in my county. CEP 805 required me to find math resources online and evaluate their usefulness. In the end, I created a database of resources that could be used to assist and enhance math instruction. I actually use my database consistently throughout the year and found a lot of the resources to be very beneficial for my students. This course helped me to incorporate more technology into my classroom as well as be able to evaluate different resources.
My journey into obtaining my Master of Arts in Education degree was very eye-opening and beneficial. I started out not very excited about continuing my learning and am ending with the goal of furthering my education even more. I now approach my teaching to make sure that I always have my students’ needs in mind. Throughout this time, I have grown more confident in my abilities to be a great teacher and am ending my journey with the idea that I will always be a life-long learner.
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