Here's my first success story! Thank you, Emily, for being my first client ever!
Emily is a local junior high and high school French teacher. Over the past summer, she wanted to use her free time to prepare for the upcoming school year by updating her current vocabulary lists, writing vocabulary stories, and writing a new style of assessment - tiered projects. She felt by doing these things she could teach more effectively and help the students to better connect to the material through choice and real-world scenarios.
Emily asked me to work with her over the summer to hold her accountable to completing her work. Had I not worked with Emily, she might not have completed her work and met her goals to help her students. She would have either had to add this work onto her school year workload (grading, teaching, planning, attending meetings, helping students before and after school, etc.), which would have added to her stress levels, or she would have had to sacrifice the quality of her lessons by using old material and old assessments.
By meeting biweekly, I was able to help Emily to set goals and meet them. I showed her how to schedule the time to work on her material progressively throughout the summer. I also helped her to set her overall goal and then work backwards, creating smaller goals throughout the summer that would allow to reach the main goal by the time school started. By meeting face to face, Emily felt more motivated to reach her goals and worked consistently throughout the summer. I was also able to help Emily by providing her with my professional opinions as a former teacher when she struggled with creating something or planning how it would work logistically in the classroom.
When reflecting on our work together over the summer, Emily said, “Working with Sarah as my accountability coach over the summer has given me the most stress-free start of the school year I’ve ever had. She helped me get more school planning done over the summer than I’ve ever done before. Not only did Sarah help by suggesting tools to help me meet my work goals, she also gave me useful and relevant ideas to enhance my planning and preparation for the school year and to be the best teacher I can be. Throughout our professional collaboration time, Sarah kept me motivated, reflecting as a professional and provided me with research about new projects I wanted to incorporate into my planning.”
Who do you know that could use some help to stay motivated to achieve goals and complete work projects? Please respond to this post with his or her name and situation. I promise to give this person the service he or she deserves!