Introduction

Well its time.  As I established my professional goals for this next school year, I’ve decided to take on the blogging challenge.  Even though I have so many ideas, thoughts, opinions, etc.  I’m finding it difficult to begin.  So here goes…

Hello, I am Melissa Gibson-Steiner.  Just over ten years ago, I decided to embark in the education world as a second career teacher.  After volunteering in my children’s classrooms and being given more and more opportunities to work with children, I fell in love with the challenge of helping children to think, problem solve, and understand concepts so they could understand the world better.  During my professional business career, I never encountered the same fulfillment as I do working with children.  While there are many teachers who impacted my decision to join them, it was Kristy Crouch and Mary Smithey who became my mentors in this decision.  Thank you, ladies.

I have taught in both the primary and intermediate elementary grades.  Last year, I began teaching half-day kindergarten and spent the second half of the day as the math interventionist (a new position for our school) and math instructional coach.  I have discovered I really enjoy working with both children and adults.  This summer I completed my Colorado principal license through the University of Colorado at Denver and look forward to taking on more leadership responsibilities in the future.

So why am I here?  I am a very reflective person and discovered that if I establish goals for myself, I am more proactive.  As this school year approaches, I have established the following goals:

1. Establish a Professional Learning Network (PLN) so that I can learn from others, reflect, and engage is thoughtful conversations.  I decided to challenge myself to use the following tools to establish a global network:  Blog, Twitter, and Google+.
2. In Kindergarten, I need to engage students to become responsible for their learning and to better incorporate technology as a learning tool.
3. In Math, last year I discovered struggling students need help engaging and taking responsibility for their learning.  This year, my goal is to have them more responsibility for their learning by having them progress monitor their own learning and to utilize math journals.

A dear colleague and mentor, Autumn Crosby, share something she learned about goal setting from the ISTE 2011 conference.

• The first goal, you will have fantastic success at.
• The second, you will make headway and be pleased with what you have done, but will want to do more.
• The third, you will most likely have little growth, but that's ok! Celebrate what you have done with the first two goals and try again next year.

Hopefully, there is success and growth this upcoming year.