Reflection Letter
I have taught English in Texas public schools for eighteen years. During that time, I have taught every grade level of high school, from gifted and talented to on-level courses. I have become an expert over the years at writing lessons and differentiating instruction for various learning styles and levels of learning.
I have also worked in leadership positions as both an instructional facilitator and a team lead, which allowed me to provide instructional support to teachers in the elements of research-based instruction; to demonstrate the alignment of instruction with curriculum standards and assessment tools; to design, coordinate, and provide instructional professional development opportunities for department personnel; and to mentor novice teachers in both instructional and social-emotional needs.
While I enjoy teaching and surrounding myself with student success, it was beginning to have a negative impact on my health, and I felt I could no longer remain in the classroom.
When I resigned from teaching in May of 2022, I faced an identity crisis. What now? I don’t think the general public realizes how much of a teacher’s identity is wrapped up in being a teacher. If I am not a teacher, what am I?
In September, I attended a free workshop on instructional design and thought, “This is it! This is my next plan.” After applying to a few jobs and being immediately rejected, I decided that I needed to do something to make myself distinct in this sea of transitioning teachers. I have always believed that the way out is through more education, so in October of 2022, I enrolled in the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley’s M.Ed. in Educational Technology program. I finish my degree in August 2023.
My hope was that this master’s degree and additional graduate certificates would fill in the gaps in my learning within the field of instructional design, particularly where technology was concerned. While I have a strong background and understanding of lesson delivery, pedagogy, classroom management, and mentorship, I am limited in the amount of technology in which I am proficient.
As I near the end of the program, I am much more confident in my abilities. Projects required in this program required me to learn how to instruct learners using unfamiliar software. I welcomed the challenge and its accompanying frustration.
My first real struggle was determining how to set up my e-portfolio. While I am a certified Google educator and quite familiar with Google Sites, the program is limited in its capabilities. I decided to attempt WordPress. I discovered very quickly that WordPress is intricate and cumbersome. Although I am not a luddite, I felt that without direct instruction, WordPress was beyond my capabilities. (I filed it away as something to learn in the future.)
I spent the money with GoDaddy to secure a domain because although this wasn’t necessary for the program, I recognized that eventually I would need this domain for my professional portfolio. I discovered that GoDaddy has a version of WordPress that they call their “Website Builder.” It is much more manageable than the original form of WordPress. Their help and FAQ pages are written in plain English, and they have tech support ready at all times. Thankfully, I was able to build what I think is a decent portfolio.
In my Multimedia/Hypermedia course, the class project consisted of creating a video tackling an instructional problem. After doing some research and talking to my classmates in a WhatsApp chat, I settled on using Canva. This was a program that I had heard of—many of my younger colleagues used it in their classes—but I was a novice. I quickly realized that I need to pay for the pro account to access the features I wanted to use. I vowed to use it often to make it worth the money.
After trying and failing to create the type of project that was expected, I learned how to create a presentation with embedded videos. However, another requirement of the project was to include an interactive quiz at the end of the lesson, embedded within the presentation. This became my next hurdle.
After researching Canva’s help pages, I determined there were only a few programs that would integrate into Canva, one of which was Google forms. Once again, I found myself biased against Google products. I had a vision in my head of what I wanted this section of the project to look like, and it wasn’t a boring, old Google form.
I returned to Canva’s help pages and discovered a program called Typeform. I created some questions and was pleased with their appearance, but in the process of testing out each quiz question to observe the data collection process, I quickly reached the limit for free answers and chose to abandon the program.
At this point, I was out of time, so I reluctantly settled on using Google forms. My project fulfilled the rubric requirements and received a 100, but I was not thrilled with the result. This was my first lesson in meeting a deadline with what I felt was a sub-par product. I am sure that this is something that I will have to do from time to time in my new career, but it is one aspect that makes me uncomfortable. I am unhappy when my final product doesn’t match my original vision.
My inner overachiever reared her head this past module when I took EDTC 6325 and the practicum course concurrently. EDTC 6325 required that I create an entire course in Canvas, a daunting task for some but an inspiring challenge for me. I was confident because I had used Canvas for many years in my previous school district.
To make things easier on myself, I chose a topic that I was extremely comfortable with—grammar—and turned it into an instructional solution. My goal, however, was not to create a grammar class for high school students. I wanted something that I could put in a professional portfolio, and since I am not going back to teaching, I had to figure out how to make this topic apply to adults in the corporate world.
Writing is important no matter the career, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to create a writing course to improve communication skills in the business world. After all, a company’s professional reputation is reflected in the emails and business reports that their employees write.
I used Facebook to circulate a needs assessment with the caveat that English teachers shouldn’t respond. (They’re not reflective of the general public’s writing abilities.) Some of my friends shared the Facebook post, so I even got responses from people I don’t know.
The results revealed more grammatical concepts that needed to be covered than space in this course, so I chose to make a second, supplemental course on communication for my practicum project.
Using the results from the needs assessment, I chose the most common communication errors and determined an appropriate order to teach them in, splitting the lessons between my EDTC 6325 project and my practicum. I returned to my trusty Canva and used Audacity for voiceover recording. I created 25 videos between these two projects. I am a Canva expert now! I also learned a few programs for creating educational games in the process of completing my practicum project.
I feel proud of what I have accomplished. I worked very hard on these projects—three weeks straight with no time off on the weekends--and created materials that I could not have made a year ago. With a few tweaks, I think these materials are sufficient to place in my professional portfolio to showcase my abilities to potential employers.
Although I have been applying for learning and development jobs throughout this process, I plan to start including my portfolio in those applications now. I hope that this will be the thing that makes me stand apart from other transitioning teachers and will secure me a job in corporate learning and development.
My goal is to work as an instructional designer, curriculum designer, corporate trainer, or other position within the learning and development field where I will be able to integrate my decades of teaching experience with my new skills in educational technology. From the various design models to the practical application of skills within e-learning programs, I believe I now have a strong foundation on which to set my new career. I would also like to complete some of the industry-standard certification, like those through ATD; however, the money tree has stopped producing fruit, so I hope to find a job that will pay for those.
I do want to take a moment in this letter to offer accolades for the EdTech program at UTRGV. These courses were masterfully created, from the ease of navigation and usability to the vertical alignment of the projects from course to course. The only time I encountered problems in the program was in the courses outside of the EDTC department. This program is a cohesive unit, which helped me see the value in all that I was completing as well as gave me confidence with the increasing difficulty of the projects in each course. I would recommend this program to anyone seeking their master’s in educational technology.