Problem Statement?

When I signed up for the "Redesigning America's Schools" at Harvard, through Fund for Teachers, I had no idea all of the reflective thinking that would go into preparing for it. When the seminar people asked me to send them my problem statement, I was perplexed at what my problem was at school. I first thought it would just be about me going to the seminar and passively learning about what other "experts" have to say. But coming up with the problem required some conversation with one of the directors at my school about what my challenges were at school.

This required some thought into what I needed as a teacher to sustain myself as a professional. This was a tough problem for me because I had to assess myself. I had a difficult time doing this because I feel like part of teaching a school year has so much to do with following through and just making it to the end. But as I discussed more with my director, I felt that the biggest thing to pop up for me was sustainability. How do I sustain myself as a teacher. I didn't feel that sustainability was an appropriate problem to pose at the seminar, but it kept popping up in my head. How do I sustain myself as a teacher? If we as a school want to maintain a specific standard in our school, how do we sustain a level of consistent assessment?

The "how do I sustain..." kept popping up in my head. Especially, because next year will be my official 5 year mark as a teacher and statistics show that half the teachers quit by the 5 year mark. This is something I hope to answer by the end of the seminar in order to find out how teachers who've taught longer than I have do it.