If you’ve been around here much, you probably know, I really enjoy reflective practices and planning sessions. Today, I’m going to take you along with me during my mid-semester check-in process.
Hot tip: if you want to do a check-in and don’t really care about my reflections, progress, and thinking, just read the headings. 🙂
How are you landing here today?
To get started, I asked myself this question. It was the end of my spring break; so, I was feeling pretty rested and ready to reflect on where I’d been and where I want to go by the end of the semester. The week hadn’t gone completely as I’d hoped (hello, smashed fingers!), but it was a good week overall.
What as your primary emotion for the first half of the semester?
Even with all of my careful planning, and maybe because of my careful planning, I felt “too much” during much of the beginning of the semester. Because last semester felt so calm and balanced, I added in a few too many high output professional development activities to the early part of my semester. These opportunities required reading scholarly literature, watching videos, and submitting projects. Each was a bit more intensive than I anticipated. Note to self, read the syllabus before joining.
What went well/didn’t go well during the first part of the semester?
I’m so excited that one of my favorite co-authors and I locked in a 3rd co-author for the textbook we’re creating. I think this team is going to knock it out of the park with what we create! I can’t wait to share more with you.
Those professional development courses were very useful to me – even though I’m glad they’re ending so I have more time to think. As I mentioned this is part of what didn’t go well for me. Through coaching, I’ve come to realize that when I have lots of things I could be doing, I freeze up and have a hard time picking one to just get started. I’m working on this, but knowing this means I need to be careful with how to schedule so I don’t get to the frozen point.
How am you progressing on the goals you set for the year?
I had multiple goals, and I assessed my progress on each. Some people write all of their their goals in terms of metrics – number of articles submitted, number of new clients, etc. – I have overarching visions with project-based goals to support those.
Sustainable Business Practices
For example, one of my visions is to Build Sustainable & Solvent business practices to positively impact early career faculty. Of course by sustainable and solvent, I want to be paid for the work I do (coaching, editing, etc.); however, not all of my work and content is for paying clients. This vision is about building sustainable systems so I can continue to provide free content along with paid services to support those free offerings for the community. My metrics are around the number of subscribers, clients and coaching hours toward my International Coaching Federation certification.
Impactful Teaching and Mentoring
Another of my visions is to Provide value to OSU through impactful teaching and mentoring practices.This statement doesn’t have specific metrics tied to it, but I have projects and goals with metrics that support it. For example, one metric is to provide feedback on assessments within one week of submission. So far I’m hitting this target, which feels so good! You may remember this has been on my goal list for a while. It’s amazing with a 2-2 (as opposed to a 4-4) teaching load will do for keeping up with grading. Because I allow my students reassessments as part of specifications grading, I need to provide effective feedback loops that support student learning and growth.
The specifications grading component has been a bit of a challenge this semester for my lower level language course. As with most lower-division courses, there are multiple sections of the course running with multiple instructors. Our department administration wants the grading systems to be the same across sections of a course and they want the weekly homework and major assignments to be the same across courses (at least the minimum expectations of homework and assignments). Since I have been using specifications grading and my colleagues haven’t – and we haven’t had sufficient time to build community, trust, and co-designing relationships, this has been a challenge to implement. I’m taking notes this semester about how I can structure the syllabus to allow for some variation that will allow for specifications grading within a more traditional final grade determination system. I’ll keep you posted on what I try for the fall.
Cultivating Healthy Habits
The area I’m falling down on is Cultivating healthy personal and family habits and connections. A metric I had set for myself was to walk 23 minutes 4 times per week. I’ve not been doing that. This is going to disrupt my ultimate plan to have sufficient stamina to keep up with my family during our summer trip. Doing this mid-semester check-in reminds me that I need to move this to my daily reminders and set some additional structure around accomplishing the goal. More on the plans later.
Provide value through impactful scholarship
I’m making progress as expected in this area. I resubmitted an article (about the status of 4-year Interpreter education programs in the US) that was previously reviewed. I’ve submitted 2 proposals to present at the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf conference. Will you be there? I’d love chat with you if you’ll be there. I’m well on my way with the book proposal that I plan to submit by the end of March. I’m still in data collection mode for the first-year faculty study. My reflective practices paper is currently on hold while I focus on the book proposal.
How am I progressing on my learning goals?
When I created my visions and goals for the year I also created learning goals for myself. To keep this post for going way longer than necessary, I’ve grouped my learning goals below. And, I’ve provided a short update around each topic.
Teaching & Learning Related Learning Goals
I wanted to develop additional empathy for learners and identify new teaching techniques and strategies. I also wanted to gain more insight into the Deaf experience to be able to bring that into my courses. Two of my 3 professional development courses were directly in alignment with this goal. Additionally, I’ve read some books. One of the best resources I’ve read this year is Learning that Matters: A field Guide to Course Design for Transformative Education. My university’s library has online access to this book; yours may too. Another excellent resource, that I’ll admit I haven’t been able to fully engage with yet, is The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching.
Business Skills and Knowledge
I’ve run a business before, and my husband ran a retail shop for 15 years. So, I know the nuts and bolts of running a business. Since I’ve moved into a new area (aspiring and early career faculty professional development), I’m working to increase my knowledge around marketing and engagement with new folks. I’m also working to build my skills and knowledge around coaching and developmental editing.
One of the main ways I’m building business savvy is through a community program called Wandering Aimfully (aka WAIM). It’s been nice to have a step-by-step process to follow for building systems and processes for my business.
I’ve taken multiple coaching courses with Dr. Katie Linder through her higher education coach training program.
The other professional development program I took this spring was a developmental editing course with Laura Portwood-Stacer (the author of The Book Proposal Book, that I’m using to finalize the book proposal I’m current writing). My goal is to be able to offer developmental editing support to authors of journal articles and book chapters (not entire books). If you might be interested in developmental editing services, you can reach out to me via email, telegram, or schedule a Questions with Kimberly call.
Emotional Intelligence
I’ve read some additional books on this topic, and I’ve also continued to build reflective practices in this area. I plan to take an intercultural competence development inventory later this year.
Textbook design
I read a book about textbook design, Writing and Developing Your College Textbook: A Comprehensive Guide. Now I’m applying that to the book proposal I’m working on.
How satisfied are you with your current buckets?
I have several buckets in my life (teaching, family, friends, scholarship, service, business, household tasks, etc.)…you probably do too…So, if you were to think about each of your major buckets how satisfied are you with those areas?
You might think about it in terms of how much time you’re spending or maybe just the amount of thinking and mental expenditure in those areas. You might create a bar graph, or a pie, or just draw buckets and draw a line to represent how full they are in terms of satisfaction for you. I rated mine based on 0 (totally not satisfied) to 10 (100% totally satisfied). None of my buckets were at 0 or 10, although several were close to 10.
What buckets/areas might need adjustment to increase your satisfaction?
I spent some time journalism about the above areas and what I might need to adjust. Even if I’m spending very little time, I might be 95-100% satisfied. If I’m not satisfied, I might need to start doing something to increase satisfaction. Or, I might need to consider what I might want to stop doing.
Of course, you probably won’t have the capacity to tackle everything all at once. But I find the process of thinking about multiple areas to be helpful for considering what I can do in the coming months.
For example, I need to start walking more – so I’m considering how to design a linked habit (also called, habit stacking) to increase my walking – for example listening to podcasts or audio-books only on walks.
What emotion do you want to permeate the last 1/2 of the semester?
We’ve spent a lot of time in review and reflection about the semester thus far. Now, I’m turning to the future. What emotion do you want to feel throughout the rest of the semester?
Who do you need to be? How do you need to show up?
I want to feel more balanced – time to work, think, moving, rest. That’s the main word that’s coming up for the rest of the semester. To achieve my word of the year – Impact! – I have to think about balance so I can have energy for doing the work that is most impactful.
What do you need to accomplish?
What goals do we want to complete by the end of the semester? You might consider a brainstorm of what you want or could do, and then cull it to what you aim to accomplish by the end of the semester.
I’m going to:
- submit my book proposal,
- start walking again,
- vacuum twice a week (😳🙈),
- finish data collection for first-year faculty study,
- continue daily Italian lessons
What weeks do you need to block off on your calendar?
Take a look at the calendar to see the “caution weeks,” as one of my mentors called them. Mark the calendars to remind yourself that there may be large chunks of time that you have to do some other specific work that doesn’t directly align with the projects you want to complete.
Do you have conferences coming up? Obviously, your routine and schedule will change during those weeks and you’ll have a hard time keeping your regular productivity – because you’ll be productive on other tasks.
Where can you fit your projects into your schedule?
Obviously, if you’ve got weeks that your regular routine and schedule will be disrupted, you’ll need to fit your work into the other chunks of time.
If you break those projects down into smaller chunks, where will you fit the chunks into your schedule? What routines or habits can you build upon to keep your projects moving forward?
What accountability structures do you need?
If you’d like some accountability support from me, you can send me an email, join the slack community, or hop on a quick call (see my schedule below).
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