Final Reflections 5301

For the 15 years now I have had wonderings, I just did not know they were called wonderings. I just assumed that I had an opinion about how I thought education should be. As I began to read or texts, I found out that principal inquiry and action research are major areas of interest in a principal’s career.      

     The above quote from the Harris text, Examining What We Do, highlights perhaps one of the most difficult areas to address in an educators professional life. The decision for me to even enroll in the Masters in Educational Administration Graduate Study program was a decision mired in the thought of not having enough time to do the work. One great quote take from Martin Luther, the father of Protestantism, always comes to mind when I think of time management. He said that he never had enough time to complete his work in a day, so in order to get all of the work done he would need to pray more during the day. This to me seemed to work against itself. By no means am I comparing religion to a master’s degree, but the idea that working towards my master’s degree would bring clarity to my teaching and in turn make work more productive has become very evident in my life.

     Another interesting aspect of this course is the discussion board and Facebook interaction, as well as the blogs. This has been such an amazing growth area for me in terms of the realization that there are not only other educators out there with very similar ideas that I have, but also people with brilliant ideas that I can learn from as grow in my profession. I particularly love the fact that we need to go and search and hunt for followers on our blogs. I had read a few blogs here and there, but never with the fervor that I read my classmates blogs during this 5301 Research class. The networking that has occurred as a direct result of this class has to be one of the most gratifying things I have learned.

     I do not know if the meeting with my field supervisor/director counts as an activity, but I really enjoyed getting to know Dr. Heath. He was able to share some things with me in our first meeting that I was able to take back and share with my colleagues. They then went online and found even more information, which sparked some amazing conversations in our hallway. I wonder if he knows he did that. I will have to tell him in our next web conference.

     Last, but not least, would have to be the assignments and activities we did do. The required meetings with my site supervisor from 5311 were good, but just not quite deep and noteworthy. The meetings sparked from this 5301 class were off the charts. The amount of communication that occurred between my site supervisor and me was incredible. Emails, phone calls, face to face and across many faces. We would miss our original appointments and then reschedule, miss again and reschedule, meet while we were scheduling. It was incredible. I must say that I have developed an entirely new level of appreciation and respect for my site supervisor. I never quite saw her the way that see her now. She is smart, responsible, caring and understanding. She will improve the culture of our school no doubt, if we can just get away from so many tests at the high school level. But that’s another action research project.