PSII Goals

Cayley van Aken

1. Maintain healthy balance between teaching responsibilities and self-care
Reasoning: I am very prone to pushing my personal needs to the side and prioritizing
teaching responsibilities, but this ultimately harms my personal mental health and
reduces my ability to work on professional obligations.
Plan: to meet this goal I intend to give myself more time for self-care and personal
needs. Meeting this goal is not as simple as giving myself a certain number of hours
a week, but instead involves me prioritizing myself and giving myself permission to
take time off.
Timeline: This goal is ongoing and will involve working daily, weekly, and over the
course of the whole practicum to find balance.
Indicators: At the end of each week I will rate myself and my mental health. Certain
weeks I may need more time for myself compared to others, and that is okay, but at
the end of the week I want to reflect on the past week and see if I have maintained a
balance that I consider acceptable. I will record these reflections in my ongoing PSII
practicum journal.
2. Create strong closures for all of my lessons
Reasoning: In my PSI I often found that my lessons finished with me being able to
achieve closure.
Plan: To meet this goal I need to do several things. Firstly, if my students are working, I
should not be afraid to interrupt them for closure. Secondly, I need to pay more
attention to the clock to ensure that I call the class back together with the appropriate
amount of time left in the lesson to allow conversation but not too much time that
there is wasted space at the end of the lesson.
Timeline: This is another ongoing goal that I hope to work on throughout the practicum.
Indicators: At the end of each lesson I will reflect on my ability to achieve closure and
the effectiveness of my closure in each lesson.
3. Form relationships with students
Reasoning: In my PSI I was moving a lot between classes and taught a huge range of
students and as a result I felt that I did not form meaningful relationships with a lot of
my students. In PSII I have two main classes that I will be teaching, which is a lot less
students than I had for PSI and I would like to focus on getting to know these
students.
Plan: I have already begun to implement strategies to get to know the students. First, on
orientation day I had my students complete an interest inventory, which taught me
quite a bit about their learning preferences and interests. Going into practicum I have
decided to dedicate my entire first day to getting to know my students and letting
them get to know me. I also plan to use name tags that I hand out at the start of each
class, this will force me to get to know students names a lot quicker.
Timeline: I am hoping to know all of my students names by the end of the second
week, and fostering relationships throughout practicum.
Indicators: Knowing student names is a good indicator that I have put time into learning
about students, but it is not a real indicator of the underlying relationships. However, I
believe that if I have actively fostered relationships, the indicator will be a tangible
change in the classroom environment.