Kelley Nobles 

I chose to focus on School Leadership in hopes of strengthening my communication skills and becoming more successful when working with my colleagues. What I gained, though, was a new perspective on my role within my school. Since beginning the program, I have begun to view myself as someone who can provide a valuable opinion about the needs of the school as a whole. My work can affect not only the students in my classroom, but also every student and staff member within the organization.

 

I feel confident in my ability to plan and organize learning opportunities that allow for true collaboration amongst my co-workers, as well as identify organizational challenges and implement school wide changes. So far, I have taken on a large leadership role within my school’s Social Emotional Learning team, and will be able to use the skills and strategies I have recently developed to move our school in a positive direction. Not only did my work throughout the School Leadership program give me the confidence needed to take on roles such as this, it also further strengthened my belief in myself as a lifelong learner. Now more than ever, I believe that to better my practice, and myself as a person, I must continue to learn and grow. I fully intend on finding learning opportunities in all areas of my life, as well as to continue my education in a formal setting.

 

In order to create positive changes school wide as a leader, I must be able to connect with all stakeholders. Many of the students, family, and community members that I interact with are Spanish speakers. I have been able to reach out and use several different resources in order to communicate effectively with these stakeholders, but as a leader, I feel it is important to be able to do this on my own. Nelson Mandela once said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart." I appreciate each one of my students’ backgrounds and cultures, and feel that it is my responsibility as an educator to work toward forming strong connections with them. To be able to speak to my students and their families in their native language would help to strengthen the bond that I have with them. For these reasons, my most immediate area of growth is to learn to read, speak and write in Spanish. Because I would like to start working on learning Spanish right away, I have purchased the language learning software Rosetta Stone.  I plan to continue using the program throughout the upcoming summer in hopes to be able to have a language foundation built before the start of the next school year.

 

Several of the courses that I took during the program gave me the opportunity to look closely at my current organization and find areas of challenge, or aspects of the organization that I could work to improve. Although there were many aspects of my school community that are very successful, there were also several areas that I would like to see change. The school has a bilingual program that services a large portion of the student population. Through my work, I found that there are bilingual needs that are currently not being met. Although I could identify these needs, I do not feel that I have enough knowledge on bilingual education to make the best decisions for the program at this time. I plan to continue my formal education by completing an English as a Second Language (ESL) endorsement. I plan to begin taking courses toward this endorsement beginning in the summer of 2016. Although I really enjoyed the online structure of the Master of Arts in Education (MAED) program at Michigan State University, I feel that the courses that I will take to complete an ESL endorsement would be most impactful in person. In order to complete the courses along with teaching, I plan to enroll at the University of Chicago. Completing this endorsement would not only improve my practice within my own classroom, as I have many bilingual students and will again next year, but will also provide the knowledge that I need in order to plan to improve the bilingual program at the school. 

 

Ultimately, my work throughout the course of the MAED program at Michigan State University confirmed my belief that education is a process that does not end with a college degree, but that continues throughout a lifetime. Completing the program provided me with many new skills and a lot of new knowledge, but more importantly opened my eyes to additional opportunities to learn and grow.