Where I Am Going
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My goals as a future professional educator have evolved during my professional career. After spending four years as a teacher and two as an administrator, my goal now is to find an administrative role that still enables me frequent and consistent contact with students. When I moved into the Admission Office two years ago I was concerned that leaving the classroom would separate me from our student body. By maintaining my role as a coach and assuming leadership in the dorm, however, I have been able to maintain the connection with the students that I believe is necessary to achieve the impact that I desire. This has been made easier by the demands of living and working in an independent school environment. As such, my goal is to stay in such an environment while pursuing a position as a Dean of Students.
My first step in the pursuit of this goal is to study and learn from my current Dean of Students and his office. This is a resource that is readily available to me and offers a firsthand opportunity to learn both the intricacies of the office and position as well as best practices in handling his various responsibilities. As a Dorm Head and member of the Enrollment Management Team, I have more insight into the Dean of Students office and will use this insight and exposure to better understand both the position and how I would embody this role.
As my title and role at Millbrook has changed, from the classroom to the administration, I have continued to enjoy my role as a coach. Consequently, an area on which I would like to continue to focus is how to best use my role as a coach to positively impact the physical, mental, and emotional development of the athletes I coach. I can pursue this focus by continuing to attend professional coaching conventions (such as the American Baseball Coaches Association Convention) while also continuing to explore literature centered on these principles. During this program, two such authors that I have enjoyed are Joe Ehrmann (TED talk below) and Tom Farrey. The work of both authors offers critiques of various youth sport organizations while examining best practices and/or solutions to create coaching methodology that is most useful for the prolonged success (inside and outside of athletics, as Ehrmann’s talk demonstrates) for the student-athlete.
The final topic to which I would like to devote future study is effectively utilizing social media as an educational tool. This is a topic that I touched upon in some of my coursework in pursuit of Michigan State’s Master of Arts in Education (MAED) and one that I believe is especially relevant for our students in the current world. In the boarding school environment, we frequently view social media as a threat, but I would like to dedicate further study to finding ways to use it productively and educate our students as to how to use it safely. One reading from my coursework that prompted my interest in this topic was Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology, by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson. A helpful framework for thinking about how to best utilize the opportunities of social media is SAMR (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition) to be sure that this technology is modifying or redefining the lesson, offering transformative educational opportunities.
In conclusion, I have enjoyed the variety of opportunities and roles that I have had over the past six years and am eager to build upon these. After exploring different areas of school life, I believe that a Dean of Students position would best enable me to achieve my professional goals while also providing the daily opportunity to have a positive impact on individual students and school culture as a whole. Drawing on further study into best practices in coaching and effective uses of social media in education, combined with communication and exposure with the current Dean of Students office, I believe that I can continue along my current professional path and enter a Dean of Students position well-prepared to impact and lead a new community.