Bailey MeCey

Coming into this week, there was some stress of getting the material necessary to finish the project. The materials that I was missing were the interview answers and photos.

Thankfully, I was able to get the rest of my interview answers from my Montessori and Emotionally Responsive Practice schools. The interviews were with the instructional coach and lead social worker and climate coach, so they both provide an interesting perspective on the goals of the models.

In writing the Emotionally Responsive Practice model blog, the goal was to highlight how it aims to address the whole child that might be dealing with adult-sized stressors. It paired very well with my research, which talked about how if these types of stressors are not addressed early on they can lead to health problems later on in life.

One of the quotes from my Emotionally Responsive Practice interview that communicates a lot of the focus of the school was, “Most importantly we are teaching the whole child through Emotionally Responsive Practice and teaching our students the skills needed to foster relationships, self-regulate, and address conflict,” said Barker. “These skills will be necessary for our students to be healthy productive members of society.”

Going back to the Montessori blog, the goal was to weave in the quotes that I now have from my interview into the body of the blog. Now with the quotes, it feels more fleshed out.

With the holidays and COVID being a major concern, I won’t be able to go into the remaining classrooms to get photos. However, I was able to get photos from the schools to use instead.

While the photos are not what I was hoping to get overall, I still feel they are usable for this project. With the color framing, I will edit the photos, which will also help make the photos feel more cohesive.

In Beginner’s Guide to Blog Interviews, Dianna Gunn covers how best to use interviews for your blogs. One way is to use quotes for your own article, which “gives your articles a journalistic feel and lends your blog an extra level of authority.”

Given that I will be posting the blogs on Medium, I want them to feel organic thanks to the quotes. They also will help give my own article the authority as they are coming from inside the programs, not just an outsider looking in.

Looking ahead, the goal is to finish editing the rest of the blogs and have them ready for publication. I also need to edit the photos with the color framing.

Another goal I want to finish by the end of the week is having the social media campaign set to go. In researching how to best go about with a social media campaign, I read How to Create a Social Media Strategy in 9 Easy Steps. One of the steps they recommend is setting up a social media content calendar. Instead of having all the content dump out all at once, a content calendar will help spread out the content to have the best impact

While the main focus of my content, which is the blogs, will go up at the same time my plan is to spread out the content for the Instagram campaign. Then, I can make the content last more and hopefully reach more audiences.

With a week to go until the project is due, I’m feeling confident about the direction it’s going in. I hope from here it is smooth sailing right up until the end.