#HSGAchievement: TAC Members on Goal-Setting
Four Hope Street Group Teacher Advisory Council (TAC) members, highly accomplished educators from around the country, share their specific aims for this semester. How does goal-setting influence your ability to achieve economic opportunity?
Sarah Giddings, Michigan
I am designing a Job Skills elective course at my school so that students can earn elective credit for the job skills and experiences they are having.
I am also helping to lead the charge to have our school complete a mission and vision statement and codify things that are unspoken processes at our school, but are important for us to have in writing if there are staffing or leadership changes.
David Edelman, New York
Goal 1: Develop creative ways to elevate student voice in connection to our learning about government and economics. I am excited for my students to participate in NYC’s participatory budgeting project in which they will research city expenditures and collectively select an area in the city’s budget to receive additional funding.
Goal 2: Help ensure our school is a place of learning and collaboration for teachers as well as students. I am excited to help ensure teacher teams are genuine, enjoyable and productive opportunities for teachers to learn and support one another.
Melissa Tracy, Delaware
I am an extremely goal-oriented teacher who cannot function without an excessive number of multi-colored post-it notes lined up on my desk. I create post-it notes for short and long term goals on a daily basis. At the end of the day, I find it incredibly empowering to cross off items on my list. As a teacher leader at my school, I also utilize action plans to track the progress of school-wide initiatives. Action plans keep me honest. Prior to being a Hope Street Group National Teacher Fellow, I had never made an action plan. While working on my individual project on student experience surveys for Hope Street Group, I utilized an action plan to stay motivated and to stay laser-focused.
Professionally, my goal for this semester is to help make my school campus more eco-friendly. At Odyssey Charter School, I am actively involved in our Green Team. As a member of Pathways to Green School, our school is currently pursuing five pathways: waste and consumption, sustainable foods, energy, healthy living, and schoolyard habitat. Our team has ambitious plans for the spring. Our biggest plan to triple the size of our school garden. In addition to KN-5th grade students planting and harvesting vegetables, middle school students will pilot a geo-inquiry project addressing food insecurity in Wilmington, DE. Students will identify local food deserts in the community, engage in research, and collect data to understand the significance of the problem. They will use the garden as a resource to effect change in the community and to provide vegetables to 100+ community members. They will educate 100+ community members on food insecurity with an educational video documentary to share with the community, which will get 1000+ views.
Finally, there will be a school community dinner where students present their service learning project and video, give a tour of their garden, and invite the community to taste the garden fresh produce grown. The sixteen additional raised beds will grow vegetables that will be directly donated to Wilmington food banks. Moreover, we are installing four water bottle filling stations, starting a school-wide recycling and composting program, building a pollinator garden and two outdoor classrooms, and adding a chicken coop.
Personally, my main goal is to read a social-justice book a week in order to do a better job of infusing this content into my classroom.
Douglas Price, North Carolina
My goal for this semester at school is for me to employ more community members into my classroom. We already have some community members that are frequently engaged with our school, and even my own classroom. But, I want to be more intentional about reaching out to those that surround our school environment and engage those members with more intentionality.
Our school is a PBL-model and has an excellent curriculum that naturally lends itself to community guests, members, and stakeholders to come and be a part of what we do in our classrooms.
