I stumbled upon something so inspiring that I had to share it on this wonderful Saturday morning!  I even wanted to remember exactly where I learned about the 30 goals Challenge, so I went through my full web history. Do you ever do that?  It’s actually fascinating to see how page clicks take you from one place to another…it’s almost like a brainstorm in the form of a dropdown menu. It almost makes me want to mindmap how I got to this point…

But I digress…

I was reading through my news aggregator, Feedly, and came across a post from Shelley Terrell entitled, “Goal: Build Your Teacher Survival Kit.”  I clicked on the post, read it, and saw something about a 30 Goals Facebook Group (I read the blog post too!).  I kept looking around her Teacher Rebootcamp website to learn more. What I discovered really caught my eye, and I completely ditched what I was working on at that moment (sorry kiddos, I’ll finish grading later!).

How the Challenge Works (adapted from Shelley Terrell):

Based on her book, The 30 Goals Challenge for Teachers: Small Steps to Transform Your Teaching, there are 30 goals from which an online community of teachers can select to spend a year working to accomplish. You can accomplish 1 to 30, it’s up to you.  When you’ve accomplished a goal, you post your reflection of what you learned, how it impacted your teaching, and how it impacted your students on the 30 Goals Facebook page, social media (#30GoalsEdu), YouTube and/or through blogging. She even has a badge system set up as an additional motivator (I thought of my friend Laurie Worthington who’s on a badge kick)!

From what I’ve been reading, it seems that you can work on the member suggested goal, or on any goal that speaks to you.

The 2015 Challenges:

Here’s a list of this year’s goals via the amazing Sylvia Duckworth:

Despite the fact that we’re halfway through 2015, I fully plan to work on as many of these goals as possible.

While you can pick from any of the goal, there are a group of teachers who are working on common goals in a certain order. I found these on the 30goals.com website. In addition, these goals are variations on the goal in the infographic above (which are based on the chapters in Shelley’s book.

After mulling it over I decided to accomplish the goal in the order that I feel most comfortable with and that speak to me at that moment in time

For reasons I don’t want to delve into, this has already been a school year of unrest – and we’ve only completed the second full week! Therefore, I’m also going to invite teachers in my school to join me, as I believe that it can only strengthen our PLN. I believe many of us need to reconnect and find unity in our purpose and vision.  Working together to improve ourselves and our craft sounds like the worthiest of pursuits this school year!

So keep an eye out for my progress!