Professionally, I aspire to be an established teacher in a classroom highly enjoying every new group of students for which I will responsibly educate. I aspire for as much teaching and instructional experience in the different fields of social studies so that I can I identify my academic strengths and areas to strengthen. I find it extremely valuable to be a reflective practitioner. My consistent reflection has helped me determine the path of my Master’s Degree. My teaching and leadership experiences within the Learning Center have inspired me to obtain my Learning Behavior Specialist endorsement within my Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction. Teaching the content through highly effective modeling is another goal I have as an educator in the classroom. By accomplishing this goal in prior experiences, students have met the targets and expectations that I designed and implemented. Working closely with colleagues in the Learning Center remains beneficial because I have been motivated to make the course content as relevant to our students’ lives as possible in order to best engage them in learning activities and assessments.

In order to meet my goals, I consistently reflect on how well I designed a lesson or a learning activity that incorporated the elements of critical thinking, problem solving, analyzing and evaluating. I integrate a question that is stated in the form of a problem, which triggers students to critically think and construct an answer throughout the lesson. For me, the impact of student learning is essentially how I can continue to motivate students’ high levels of thinking. My reflection rests on my teaching, student responses and their formative feedback to a lesson. This reflection, however, is driven by effective modeling of what I want my students to master. Throughout my experiences both at the middle school and high-school level, I have learned the significance of building a classroom community in which I model my all of my expectations clearly and concretely. I know the essentialism of clarity and structure for all students, including adolescents, who all have unique learning styles. My experience in the Learning Center has fostered greater ability to develop clearer directions, clearer expectations, and to be able to more strongly model what I wanted my students to learn and to produce in both world history and government.

Personally, as a professional, I find it very important to involve myself in some of type of leadership or volunteer role in which I serve the community that allows me to grow, enhance my skill set and present myself as a role model to individuals of similar age. I have tacked this goal by leading a small group of young professionals in Chicago, which meets to discuss a variety of contemporary issues that are relevant to our lives. Through my presence as a leader, I want to be able to cultivate new meaningful relationships and trustworthy friendships. Prior to becoming a leader, I also participated in this group, and I gained strong takeaway value, which motivated me to pursue the next step in leadership development.