The Co-op Classroom: Getting Started

 I am truly excited to start this blog today! (Not that I am not excited to write my others mind you!) My goal in writing my blogs is to share out resources, ideas, and guide other educators along their journey as a teacher, but yet as Tom Murray says keep it "personal and authentic" at the same time. I try to share with my readers relevant topics that I think about as they happen or occur to me as a teacher. That is why I am excited I have this topic as my next "mini-series" for my blog...

I am happy to announce that I was recently asked to serve as a cooperating teacher for a student in an Ed. Tech class, and I'm thrilled to participate! Recently Dr. Sam Fecich, the EduMagic genius, professor, presenter and author asked me to work with a student in her class that is learning about different technologies in the classroom. I will "meet" with this student once at least once a week and discuss what ed. tech she is learning in her class and we will collaborate to create items for the students in my class. 

The first platform that we will explore together is one of my personal favorites: Canva. I shared with her the concepts we are working on in writing, and she created two posters for the students to use in class to help them learn the apostrophe mark for punctuation, and tie in grammar with possessive nouns and contractions. 

What I am most excited about is to work with my co-op and share with her advice, ideas, and my experiences to help her and answer questions she has. As a veteran teacher it is important that I give back to the teaching community and work with early educators. They will be the ones leading someday, and I feel a personal responsibility to ensure they feel prepared and continue to fall in love with teaching. My co-op is from a different state which will also allow for me as a teacher to learn about what teaching is like in other parts of the country. Any chance I get to learn something new, I take it! In our profession you never stop learning, and every experience is an opportunity to grow. 

I am excited to share my journey as a veteran teacher here in my blogs. I hope to inspire other veteran teachers to serve as mentors and cooperating teachers, and I hope to provide pre-service teachers with some light on different topics and areas to the student teaching experience. Since this is very new, my goal is to post again at the end of the week to follow-up with how our first week goes. If along the way there are more great stories and advice to share (which I highly anticipate will,) I will attempt to post bi-weekly. 

For now here are some final thoughts: Keep the mindset that we always have room to grow and learn. Keep working with each other to create amazing experiences for your students, and for yourselves. Keep "paying it forward" to early educators; they will pave the path of education for the future! Keep sharing with you know, every ounce of knowledge is priceless, and we all have a wealth of it to share! 

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