My Teacher Mission Statement

I have gone through college knowing that it is important for teachers to have a goal, to have something specific that they want to accomplish by the end of the year.  Also, teachers need to have a reason to teach, a reason that keeps them in the classroom working with students.  For me, it was easy to think of that.  I want to teach because I love working with kids and I want to be a positive influence and role model in their life.  I want to be able to show them how great learning is.  My goal for what I want to accomplish is to teach students about grammar, writing, and reading.  I want them to learn the rules about punctuation, subject-verb agreement, writing effective introductions and conclusions, and other things.  At this point, I think I am on my way to being a great teacher – I have everything planned.

But then I read this article by Grant Wiggins and realized that I am not quite ready to teach.  I have, in fact, not planned everything.  And I really need to work on my teacher mission statement.  Grant Wiggins is not satisfied with a personal teacher mission statement, which is basically all that I have.  He also does not think it is enough for a teacher’s goal to simply cover the material throughout the year.  I also think teachers should do more than cover the material, but I’m not sure the goal I listed above does much more than that.  After reading this article, I learned that there are two specific questions Grant Wiggins believes each mission statement should answer: what is my teaching going to cause in students and how will students be different after learning the content?

I honestly have never thought about these questions when thinking about my teaching.  Now that I have, though, I think they are some of the most important questions I can ask myself as a teacher.  I want what I teach and how I teach to have an effect on students and how they live their lives.  So, trying to answer these questions, I have written a new teacher mission statement based on the information in this article and an article we read last semester in my Adolescent Literature class, “Living a Literate Life” by Douglass Kaufman.

I want students to become powerful adults and citizens by living a literate life.

At the end of the year, I hope that my students have learned the importance of reading and writing in their lives.  No matter what I teach, this is the most important thing any student could learn from me.  I don’t want to just cover the material.  I want whatever we do in class to be meaningful to my students. So even though I will have to meet standards and take time out for standardized testing, I want the majority of my class work to help students learn what a literate life is and they can live it.  Everything I do in my class will be to meet this overall goal, my teacher mission statement for the entire year.