Professional Goals for 2013 – Sevim

Where I’m Going in 2013

Human beings love making resolutions, especially at the beginning of the new year, but how many of those resolutions are focused on professional development?  If you’re like me, your New Year’s resolutions are probably focused on your personal life, but take a moment as I have done to think about where you want to be in your professional development at the end of 2013. Here’s where I’m headed.

Learn, Share, Change.  These words are at the top of my list for 2013.  As a teacher, I feel  have a  responsibility to share what I have and exchange ideas and maybe change together and change the world in a better way and maybe as Stephen Krashen says, we can make the world a better place immediately? As we are teachers, I believe that we have that power, to change the world with small but strong touches on people’s lives. Because of all these reasons, my number one is learn,share and change. I will never stop learning from others, learning and sharing what I learned with others and do little changes in education world.

Expand The Community  Recently, a teacher friend of mine asked,  ‘’Why are we sharing our knowledge with teachers who are already in our communiity? It is like a circle. We must reach out to others who are not already in our community and give them motivation and courage, too.  That’s collaboration. Otherwise we’re just passing things around the same circle all the time.”  She’s right. There are lots of great educators from all over the world who need our support. We need to reach out to them. Why not today? Why not you ?  All you need to do is to believe in yourself and take some action. By doing so, we can make our community bigger and bigger day by day and truly collaborate.  It’s in our hands.I feel that I have the courage and motivation to do this and if you are reading this blog post and involved in iTDi, it means that you have the same couage and motivation as well! Let’s start now and work together to help others outside of our current community.

Unplugged vs Connected  I’d always felt that I have to use  as much technology as possible until I attended a teacher training workshop called  Unplugged and Connected : Where Ideas Meet led by Luke Medding and Burcu Akyol. On the second day of the course, a fellow participant shared something a students of hers had said:  “I am not here to learn technology. I’m here to learn English.” Those words had a huge impact on me. Yes, we should use technology but there are other great ways to teach English. Teaching unplugged is one of them. It is communicative, engaging, and fun at the same time. Technology is just a tool — not the whole part of our teaching life. This year, I will make the most out of technology but I will try to be more unplugged as well.

The Things That Could Be Better List   I’m again the organizer of The Istanbul Bilgi University ELT Students Conference which will be held in Istanbul on March 9th and 10th this year.  This year’s focus is on Outliers in ELT, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make this year’s conference even better.  I’ve been thinking about this since the moment that last year’s conference ended. That very day, I sat down and started writing a reflection on what had gone well and what hadn’t gone so well.  As soon as I started writing, I began to see things that could have been done better, and so I created a list of those things.  I’ve been refering to this things that could be better list as I prepare for this year’s conference and it’s been helping me a lot.  Now I’ve decided to create a similar list at the end of each of my teaching days this year. As soon as I get home, I’ll think about what I did well, what I did wrong, and what things could be done better. I’m sure this list to help me better see where I am and where I want to be.

Perhaps you’d like to join me? Even if you’re in a very good place now, there are always things that could be better.  Let’s reflect, learn, share, and change together and end this year in an even better place.