My Most Recent Year of Teaching, Goals, and How I Decided on That Goal

I co-founded an alternative high school in Detroit centered on experiential learning, interest-based internships, and advisory experiences. Our charter application began with a very ambitious goal: each advisor beginning with cohort of seventeen (17) students in their freshman year and graduating over ninety (90) percent of those students four years later and ensuring that all of those graduating students were accepted into some form of post secondary institution. I had already graduated my original cohort exceeding our goals of "ninety-ninety" and was eager to take on another advisory.My final year of teaching or "advising" as it is called in the Big Picture model, involved taking over a former advisory, or rather cohort of students whose previous advisor was fired. When offered no other returning staff volunteered to take over this challenging group of students. This group of students were labeled by other staff as "highly dysfunctional" and I was asked privately by my acting principal at the time if I would be willing to lead this group of 11th grade students. After some soul searching, I confidently accepted this position knowing full well that this was going to be a challenge. Because this was their 11th grade year, many of the benchmarks and goals were established during my first cycle at the high school. As part of our junior year expectations, all students had to complete their first drafts of their 75 page autobiographies, begin their Senior Projects, and meet other pre-established requirements to move onto to the 12th grade. With this group, I knew meeting those particular goals required proper planning and execution but it would not be enough. In addition to taking over this cohort, I was also acting as a mentor, to a student teacher working towards his certification. I met with the principal to get her perspective. It was decided that this group would thrive with proper team building exercises, a focus on core academic skills such as writing and reading, and strong individualized learning plans. I began the year with a pizza-party and get together at my house and followed that experience with a ropes course to build trust at a local campsite. Coming fresh out of the National Writing Project experience over the summer, I was inspired to infuse writing exercises into our time together. We also had ACT practice exam data and we would use this information to create the student learning plans. Additionally, these plans would be