Kathryn Laurentius

I had never heard of the VIA Institute before and plan to explore that more to potentially use it with my students in future activities. I know how important know your stengths and weaknesses can be in all areas of life. 

The importance of reflection was really impactful for me. I do a lot of reflection-based assessments in my classes with students but I rarely take the time, myself, to reflect in a meaningful way. I know adding more reflection time will help me be a better educator. 

I enjoy learning about the different ways to use and apply PERMA. It is also helpful and refreshing to hear about the emphasis on prioritizing your well-being. As educators, I feel like that is often frowned upon or put on the back burner. I look forward to learning more about positive psychology. 

I learned more about the importance of advisory councils. I know they are very helpful but it is something I struggled with early in my career. Another thing I learned was the different ways for multiple CTE programs to collaborate. I also really liked the idea of having the SBE students present to the school board as I see many different benefits in that idea. 

The biggest takeaway for me is the idea of adding industry certifications to my SBE. I want to further research this and see how I could add that as an additional benefit for my students. I see a lot of benefits to this and could see where my admin would really like that added benefit aswell. 

The information I learned in this module was helpful. The ethical dilemma idea of stagging a student 'stealing' from the store and seeing how your students report it and deal with the conflict is very interesting. I often feel in the high school setting that unethical actions are so normalized that it is an interesting way to 'test' the students. I also loved hearing the emphasis of how important soft skills are. 

I currently help run a school-based enterprise at my high school. I have never started one, but have taken over an already-established business. The process of starting one from the ground up feels intimidating and stressful. I think getting the buy-in and cooperation from the administration and student body could be very challenging. 

The prompts for peer feedback is super helpful because a lot of times it is a simple mis communication or bias that is brought into the conversation. 

For leaders, knowing their staff and getting buy in from the right staff members can make PLCs more successful. It can be stressful for teachers and feel like another thing added to their plate so knowing and communicating effectively to teachers can make it easier for admin to get buy in from teachers. 

I teach a singleton in my building and so I sometimes struggle with not having others that are on the same curriculum as me. However, it is so helpful to collaborate with other CTE teachers because the framework and commonalities are so helpful to share and learn from other educators.