Analytic and Personal Essay

It has been a year and a half since I applied to become a PhD student and wrote my
original goals statement. The majority of that essay still holds true, but through my work in the
program I have realized a few things that impact my current goals. First, I stated that my primary
focus would be on literacy and my secondary area of focus would be teacher education. While I
am still committed to the area of literacy, the class I took on Teacher Development and Education
Policy helped me understand that it is not teacher education I am interested in as much as it is
professional development for teachers already in practice. I am dedicated to the teacher
practitioner. I am still interested in teaching at the college level, but I would want to focus on
helping current ESOL and special education teachers enhance their skills as literacy teachers
because in elementary schools they are often the primary instructor of our children who have the
highest needs in literacy so those students need the most highly skilled teacher in order to close
the gap. However, most ESOL and special education teacher programs require very little if any
preparation in how to teach reading so it can take years of learning on the job while countless
children make less than expected progress. I want to provide the professional development to
teach them how to reach their most struggling readers. I also believe that collaboration is a key
factor in order to accomplish this because no teacher working in isolation can meet the needs of
her students to ensure that each of them learns at high levels, especially ESOL and special
education teachers whos students have such diverse needs. Collaborating with the classroom
teacher and literacy teacher to focus on student learning and building collective efficacy
throughout the professionals in a school is so important and several of the papers I have written
in different classes have touched on that topic within the professional learning community (PLC)
concept.

The professional learning community concept brings me to the second update to my

original goals statement. I am a strong proponent of the big ideas behind professional learning
communities, that teachers embrace collaboration over isolation, focus on student learning rather
than teaching, and use data to ensure results. I am deeply entrenched in the PLC concept, have
read many books and attended workshops and conferences to deepen my learning and can quote
half a dozen big names in that field, but when I started writing papers for my classes around the
topic of professional learning communities I was astonished at how little research there is and
even how few peer reviewed articles there are on the subject. There is a proliferation of books
published by the company that packages PLC professional development and all the authors quote
each other but they all speak from personal experience and if I am going to encourage teachers to
embrace this model I need research, not just inspiring stories. If the research is not out there then
I am now going to be the one to do it. I honestly had no idea when applying to the program that
research was such a big aspect of every class. I knew Id likely eventually do research as part of
my dissertation, but I have now taken EDRS 810, 812 and 818 as well as EDRD 832 Trends in
Literacy Research so over half of my classes thus far have focused on research. My original
goals statement didnt even mention research and because I do still plan to work with
practitioners and not fully entrench myself in academia I may not do as much research over the
course of my career as some of my fellow PhD candidates but I will pursue a goal to enhance the
body of knowledge around the professional learning communities concept by focusing the
research throughout my coursework on PLCs and specifically teacher collaboration.
I have changed my secondary area of focus from teacher education to an interdisciplinary
focus through the communications department at GMU on instructional communication. This
will help me in my research around collaboration to analyze how teachers work together by

looking at organizational communication as well as interpersonal and instructional

communication. I have met with two professors in the communications department to set up a
course of study to meet the secondary focus requirements and asked one of them to join my
committee.
While I am completely open to changing directions during the journey between Portfolio
1 and my dissertation, I do have an idea of the problem, population and process I may investigate
in my research. The problem will likely focus on students who need additional support to learn to
read in the primary grades and specifically those students who are language learners living in
poverty. Because of my passion for collaboration and desire to increase the literature about
professional learning communities I will likely focus on the process of ESOL, special education,
literacy and classroom teachers working together to reach the most struggling readers. As a side
note I despise the misnomer struggling readers because often times a language learner in 1st or
2nd grade may be reading below grade level so they are labeled struggling reader (with the
negative connotations and possible low expectations) when in fact theyve made over a years
worth of growth in that school year in both language acquisition and reading so they are not
indeed struggling, but rather thriving, and simply need some additional time and support to close
the gap and perhaps surpass the grade level expectation for reading.
In conclusion, my professional goal at this point is to ensure every student has access to
quality literacy instruction and to be an agent of change in building teacher capacity to help
educators work together to meet that goal. I hope to work to accomplish this in the private sector
as a consultant and author of articles and books for practitioners as well as in the public sector as
researcher and professor.