PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY
Standard #9: Professional Learning and Ethical Practice
The teacher engages in ongoing professional learning and uses evidence to continually evaluate his/her practice, particularly the effects of his/her choices and actions on others (learners, families, other professionals, and the community), and adapts practice to meet the needs of each learner.
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Standard #10: Leadership and Collaboration
The teacher seeks appropriate leadership roles and opportunities to take responsibility for student learning, to collaborate with learners, families, colleagues, other professionals, and community member to ensure learner growth, and to advance the profession.
BRIDGES CURRICULUM
During my Elementary Resource Room clinical and my General Education clinical, I was able to pilot and implement a new curriculum with my cooperating teacher. During my clinical experience in the Resource Room, I helped the teacher pilot the Bridges Intervention curriculum. This curriculum is material-heavy and requires extensive setup, which my cooperating teacher and I did together. A similar event took place for my General Education clinical, though for this experience, I helped the first-year implementation of this curriculum.
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Having experienced the Intervention piece of the Bridges curriculum, I helped the fifth-grade team understand the curriculum smoothly. The Teachers Editions of Bridges arrived at the school after the school year started, with the first Professional Development day to learn how to teach this new Math not taking place until the end of September.
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I have worked with the grade-level team to plan instruction, along with helping calm the families' confusion and frustrations. Families felt that they were out of the loop about how to help their students, so my cooperating teacher and I came up with a solution.
There is a Student Journal, in which their classroom work pages can be found, and a Home Connections book, which the curriculum suggests to do as homework. Sending home the book wasn't beneficial to families who have never experienced how this curriculum works. Thus the families needed another support. Digging around Professional Learning Networks, my cooperating teacher and I found a teacher who filmed himself working through all the Home Connections pages. We connected those videos to our Google Classroom and communicated with the parents when we had learned the material necessary to complete the next page.
COLLABORATION
One person does not have the solution to all of the problems, and not just one person knows the ins and outs of a person. When doing your best to support a student it is best to confer and collaborate with all parties related to the student. The family at home will often have a different picture of your student than the one you have from the school setting.
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FAMILY COMMUNICATION
Progress Folders
To ensure the success of their students a teacher needs to have a positive relationship with their adults. One example is, families of students who are in the upper elementary age grades begin to get worried about grades. A teacher practice that I implement is the Progress Folder. This folder is sent out bi-weekly and updates a student’s family how they are doing on all fronts in the classroom.
DEVICE SAFETY
Technology in the classroom is a must between online learning, accommodations, and differentiation for learning. As a result, classroom expectations for devices should also be well established to make sure all students spend as punch time as possible on task and for students.
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Expectations also look different depending on the age group of the students. Below is an example of a classroom poster for lower elementary describing the device expectations with pictures as visual reminders.
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GROW YOUR KNOWLEDGE
Learning About Disabilities
- OCD Pamphlet
In a class called Teaching Exceptional Students, each student was tasked with researching a disability and creating a trifold resource that would provide a teacher with an understanding of the disability and how to support the students with the disability. Below is the double-sided trifold that I created on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
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I believe that it is my responsibility as an educator to educate myself on all types of possible learners and how to best support them in their environments.