The New Year and new challenges

With every new year comes new challenges. This year I have exchanged my Head of House role with the new role of Director of Professional Learning. I am still the Head of English as well, and I am very excited about the opportunities that my new Professional Learning role will afford me. Our school has three hours of PD for every staff member every week, on a Wednesday from 1.30-4.30. It is a great way to do it because it means that the majority of staff have only one night of meetings each week, and these meetings, rather than being administrivia, are targetted professional learning experiences.
Over these holidays I have spent a fair bit of time procrastinating about all the work I need to get done rather than just sucking it up and getting it done. It has only been this last week where I have begun to get myself on track.
It is going to be a big year. I have started by applying for the Google Teacher Academy which I first heard about through Murcha's Blog. Part of the application was creating a video about classroom innovation or motivation and learning which was a really interesting experience. Here is my video:

I liked the idea of challenging myself to make and publish the video and it was a really great learning experience for me so regardless of the outcome, I have learned something from the process.

I also have a list of challenges for myself this year that I want to record:
1. Designing a challenging and differentiated curriculum for Year 10 and Year 11 English (we don't have Year 12s yet!)
2. Continuing to build leadership and pedagogical capacity in my English team.
3. Designing an interesting and relevant Professional Development calendar for the whole school and delivering it in an interesting and interactive way.
4. Getting accepted in to and beginning my Masters in Education by research at Monash Uni.
5. Promoting Professional Development opportunities through the school and encouraging staff to offer sessions for other teachers in areas of expertise.

It is going to be a year full of challenges but also a year where I am able to extend my knowledge and abilities in many areas which is always exciting. I have also been spending some time doing some professional reading over these holidays and I really should be making notes as I go and then writing down my thoughts so there might be more of that to come this year.
My biggest challenge will be to use this blog to record my thoughts and ideas and not drop off the face of the earth when things get busy. We'll see how that works out for me!