Plan of Action

Classroom Applications
I am excited to bring lots of what I've learned from my peers this summer into the class of undergraduates I'll teach this Fall. I think that my research project will be the most useful to me throughout the semester. I created a Ning for my class, and I'm looking forward to sharing it with my students. I am eager to discover how they'll react. I know that Blackboard is what they're used to, but it has an expiration date. I want my pre-service teachers to have access to the information we'll post long after our class has ended. I'm also excited to share the PowerPoint about blogs and wikis I created. I am confident that my students will have used one of both of these Web 2.0 applications in their personal lives, but I wonder how many of them know what's out there for educators. Hopefully what I'll present will be new, and they'll be fired up to start blogs and wikis in their future classrooms.
Although the methods course I teach focuses on literacy, there are several things from the Institute this summer I plan to share with my students. I envision many of the writing prompts working their way into the mini and full lessons my students will write, and I'm looking forward to sharing many of the books I was introduced to this summer. Many of our roundtables incorporated literacy activities, so I'll certainly pull those as I find time and pass along that information to my students as well. I read aloud many picture books, but we could play an entire class period with the various titles I learned about just in the past four weeks!
Professional Development
Heather Hadley and I have already discussed taking our critical literacy lesson “on the road.” We plan to submit a proposal for Write to Learn and possibly the Whole Language Umbrella and the national National Council of Teachers of English conference. We want to share what we've learned in Steve Barrett's Critical Literacy class with other teachers, and the feedback we received from our MWP peers encourages us! So, look for two friendly presenters at a conference near you!
Personal and Professional Writing
I'd like to submit the article I wrote in Amy Lannin's Foundational Readings class last semester sometime soon. I think it's a pretty good piece; I just need to find the place for it. Writing this plan of action encourages me to put that task back on my “to do” list.
I did submit a personal piece to the NWP E-Anthology. A big step for me. It's been very gratifying to receive comments from women in Texas and Pennsylvania. I think I'll try submitting another piece! I have been published in Missouri Teachers Write before, and if that publication ever gets off the ground again, I'll definitely submit one of my pieces again. I suppose it's not of great importance to me that my personal writing gets published, but I'll continue to entertain the possibilities as they come my way.
Hurray for the Missouri Writing Project! Now it's time to put my Plan of Action into action!