Continue to grow my knowledge of business management and the corporate education world. Making the quick pivot from K-12 education to education publishing left a big gap in knowledge that I have been rapidly catching up on in my current role. Even with an abundance of formal education centered around the K-12 sector, I am well aware that my expertise of the in and outs of the corporate world falls short. I have been filling these gaps with the help of my amazing team, LinkedIn Learning courses, and Coursera online learning certificates, but I still have so much room for growth. With the extra availability I will have after my masters courses are complete, I plan to dive deeper into the offerings of these platforms and work to round out my knowledge bank. Specifically, I am focused on courses specializing in data analytics, financial management, project management, and people management.

Find a mentor in my professional world to learn from and grow with. Figuring out exactly what I want to do with my education has been a challenge I have been grappling with since I transitioned away from the classroom, and although I know I have found the right sector for my interests, I am still not completely satisfied with where I am at professionally and know that my skill has much greater potential. One of the hardest parts of my career pivot was feeling as though I was never going to have the impact on children that I once dreamed of, but in reality I have come to realize that my work in education publishing has the potential to reach the hands of more students than I ever would have impacted as a classroom teacher. While I have come to terms with this fact, I still am missing the direct connection of my education to professional work. Therefore, my long term goal is to work with a mentor within my company who can help guide me into a space where my expertise and passions align with my daily work and help me realize my full potential. I am grateful to be in a space with so many former educators, who have taken steps to combine their love for the classroom and education publishing. Through networking events within my company and using my pre-established connections, I hope to find a mentor who has achieved my aspiring goals. 

Learning how to think differently. I recently read a book by Adam Grant titled Think Again. This book taught the importance of thinking twice, thinking differently, and rethinking. Throughout my education at Michigan State University, there has been a heavy emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion within our learning community and the future learning communities we would encounter and facilitate. When each learner has unique needs, empathy, understanding, and perspective-taking are key to student success. But a teacher’s ability to facilitate an inclusive learning environment is limited by the resources available. That is why large-scale rethinking is such an important skill to have in education publishing. Teachers are at the mercy of what we produce and if our products are limited by outdated processes, students are the ones directly impacted. Thinking differently is not an easy skill to master, especially when your voice is one of thousands, but that is exactly why it has become my lifetime learning goal. This goal is multifaceted and will not only include learning how to rethink, but also learning how to make my voice heard, how to concisely, clearly, and persuasively communicate, how to question and critique deep rooted processes, and how to be comfortable in the uncomfortable among many other skills. For now, I am going to focus on investing in these skills and discovering resources similar to Grant’s Think Again.