Sarah Lipphardt

Learning Changes the World

    Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Nothing we learn in this world is ever wasted.”  As an educator, I have always believed that if I learn one thing every day, then my day was successful.  Throughout the course of earning my Masters of Arts in Education (MAED) from Michigan State University, I have again tried to learn at least one thing each week in each of my classes. I figured that if I did this, by the end of my program I would have an entire toolbox of knowledge.

When I began working on my MAED, I had a few goals. They were:

• To learn to be a better science and math teacher.

• To learn to be a better leader in my school.

• To take steps towards being a Math and Science Department Chair at my school.

    If you had told me at the beginning of this journey that I would be working as a Science and Math Literacy Specialist by the end of the program, I would have laughed.  I always figured that literacy was the English teacher’s problem, not mine.  After taking my first literacy course, I fell in love with the importance of using literacy across the contents.  I have since spent countless hours researching literacy and expanding my toolbox of literacy strategies.  In my physics classes, I began teaching students to read like physicist by giving them stategies that help them to summarize high level texts.  These can be seen below.

Now, I have some new goals and some that are similar:

• To teach science and math teachers the importance of literacy in their content areas.

• To be a better leader in my school by taking on different leadership positions.

• To be a better Science and Math Literacy Specialist.

• To take steps towards being a Math and Science Department Chair at my school.

    Throughout the course of the MAED program, I have confirmed that I do want to be a leader within my school.  I really enjoy observing other teachers and giving them feedback, and the courses that I have taken have enhanced my abilities to do so effectively.  It has become much easier to give teachers advice on how to move their classroom to be more rigorous because of the many different science and math teaching techniques that I have learned.

    Although I enjoy being the Science and Math Literacy Specialist, I would really like to someday become a Math and Science Department Chair.  I have learned that my passion is really for Science and Math instruction, and I think I can be better utilized in helping teachers develop their curriculum and teach using a variety of methods.  Wherever my job and family take me, I know that I can use the things that I have learned over the course of the past two years in order to be successful.