Embedded Files
Key elements of Standard 1
1a: Knowing and understanding young children’s characteristics and needs, from birth through age 8.
1b: Knowing and understanding the multiple influences on development and learning
1c: Using developmental knowledge to create healthy, respectful, supportive, and challenging learning environments for young children
Personal Analysis
Standard 1 could easily be considered the foundational standard for teaching in early childhood. From the start of my college career, some of the first courses I took as part of my early childhood education program were child development courses. In these courses, I learned about young children's development in all domains, as well as different developmental theories. The knowledge I gained from these courses has served as a foundation for the rest of my college education and field experiences. I feel that I have grown considerably with regard to this standard, due to the constant new information about child development I have gained throughout my undergraduate career. In my earlier field experiences, I already felt strong in my ability to apply developmental knowledge and children's characteristics and needs into my planning and practice. Now that I have completed two full semesters of student teaching, I feel that my competencies in this area have only improved even more.
Of course, there is always room for improvement, and as I enter my graduate school career I intend to continue learning as much as I can about child development and how I can apply this knowledge to other contexts within the early childhood field other than a typical classroom setting. I also aim to focus more on the other multiple influences on development and learning, because I feel that I have only recently begun to consciously incorporate this into my practice. To do this, I plan to get to know as many contextual factors as possible that affect my students in any classroom I am a part of. Such factors include family systems, racial climate, socioeconomic factors, gender norms, etc.
This standard also relates to my philosophy of education in a number of ways. My knowledge of development as well as children's characteristics and needs led to my understanding of children's natural curiosity and desire to learn, and eventually the development of my philosophy that every child learns differently. I was able to apply my knowledge of child development to my philosophy by acknowledging that teachers must use developmentally appropriate practices in their classrooms in order to provide each child with the opportunity to learn in the way that is most comfortable for them.
Artifact: School and Community Tour
1. Description
The context for this artifact is American Community Schools: Athens in Athens, Greece. I was student teaching in two settings while placed here, the first being a mixed-aged preschool/pre-k classroom in the mornings and the second being a special education resource room for elementary aged students in the afternoons. The 15 students in the preschool classroom were very diverse both in age and culture. Their ages ranged from 3 years 1 month to 5 years 4 months. Approximately half of the students were Greek, while one was from the U.S., two were from Kazakhstan, one was from Norway, two were from China, and one was from Turkey. The children spoke varying degrees of English, with the most advanced students being fully bilingual and the newest students speaking only a few words of English and only understanding some simple statements/directions. Similarly, I worked with a variety of ages while in the resource room. Even though my certification is only up to second grade, I worked with only one second grader and everyone else was in fourth and fifth grade. They came to the resource room each day with different assignments from their homeroom teacher than we needed to adapt to their level and make appropriate accommodations to help them learn the material while focusing on their IEP goals.
Map of Athens
The artifact I selected for this standard is my school and community tour. This document is split into two parts: community tour and family role. In part one, I analyzed two neighborhoods of my students as well as the neighborhood of the school itself. ACS Athens is located in Halandri, a northern suburb of Athens. Close by is Agia Paraskevi, another northern suburb, where many students at the school live. The other neighborhood I toured was Kolonaki, which is more urban as it is closer to the center of Athens. The first section of my artifact discusses what information I gathered after speaking with my clinical educators. Since I was with two clinical educators, I had a wealth of information and opinions about the school and surrounding community upon which to base my findings. In my artifact I summarized their thoughts about the school itself as well as the community of Halandri and Athens as a whole. Next I researched some statistics about the school, including tuition for each early childhood and elementary grade level (it different for part or full day as well as between preschool, kindergarten, and the rest of elementary school), population, and demographics. I also included any community statistics I could find, such as crime rates, traffic and road safety conditions, political violence and strikes information, housing costs, and income and poverty levels. In the next section, I described my tour around Halandri (where the school is located) and the other two neighborhoods Agia Paraskevi and Kolonaki. I summarized my findings and compared and contrasted the three neighborhoods, then I listed some examples of how I could use this new information in my teaching and planning. The second part of the artifact involves family role. Here, I examine the resources available for or provided to families at the school, including written material and online information. ACS Athens provides a wide array of resources for families on their website, which I was please to find. I then reflected on these resources and how they impacted families. I also reflected on my own introductory letter to the families of my own classroom and its effectiveness, as well as family involvement at the school in general. Each aspect of this document played a decisive role in my understanding of the classroom environment, my students, and my own planning.
2. Analysis
This artifact clearly demonstrates my competencies within Standard 1. In touring the communities of the school and my students and researching statistics and information about the school and community, I was able to get a better sense of the students I was serving and therefore create appropriate learning experiences for them. It was especially vital for me to complete this assignment for this student teaching placement, because I was in a very unique setting. I was not in a local public school district near my university, but rather a city where everyone spoke a different language than me and a school that was unlike anything I had ever experienced.
Key element 1a of this standard addresses knowing and understanding young children’s characteristics and needs, from birth through age 8. I technically went even further than this given than most of my students in my special education placement were in upper-elementary grades. In this artifact, I gained a deeper understanding of my students' characteristics and needs as a result of researching contextual factors that impact their learning. After discussing with my clinical educators their thoughts about the school and community as well as learning from them as much as I could about the children and their families, I felt so much more connected to my students. Coming into a classroom in the middle of the school year is already difficult, but doing so in an international setting where many of the children do not speak English made it even more challenging for me to get to know my students and form close relationships with them so that I could understand their characteristics and needs. This community tour definitely helped me in this regard, because even though it took some time to get to know each child individually, I got to know as much as I could about their characteristics and needs from speaking with their teachers and getting to know the environments in which they live and learn.
While the other key elements of Standard one are reflected in this artifact, I strongly feel that my school and community tour most clearly connects to element 1b: knowing and understanding the multiple influences on development and learning. As I mentioned in my description of the artifact, I researched a wide array of statistics about the school and surrounding community. Understanding the demographics of the school had a huge impact on my understanding of my students, because it put their characteristics such as ELL status into perspective. Learning new information about the community of Athens such as the political unrest allowed me to take into consideration the other ecosystems that are affecting each child's life while they are in my classroom. For example, there were multiple days when the metro system was on strike and I knew to expect many families to be late dropping off their children, since a large number of them relied on the metro to get to the school and instead had to walk. I also learned a lot about family involvement through this assignment, including the fact that families were much more involved at the school than I expected or had previously seen in other placements. This gave me more opportunities to involve families in their children's learning, which I knew would in turn benefit the children and their development. As a whole this artifact gave me so much insight into the myriad of outside influences on children's development and learning.
The final key element of this standard, 1c, involves using developmental knowledge to create healthy, respectful, supportive, and challenging learning environments for young children. This may be the most difficult element to master, as it requires one to not only possess the necessary developmental knowledge but also apply it in practice by planning appropriate learning experiences and creating healthy, respectful, supportive, and challenging environments. Since my school and community tour assignment was completed early on in my student teaching placement, I was able to take everything I had learned about the school, the community, and the families and apply it to my own teaching in order to best serve my students. As element 1b points out, there are multiple influences on development and learning, so my own prior knowledge of child development would not be enough to be successful as a student teacher in this setting. Combining my prior knowledge of child development for three and four year-olds with my the new knowledge I had gained about the outside influences on my specific students' development enabled me to create the most appropriate environment for my students by supporting their specific strengths and needs, such as their various language needs.
3. Reflection
I have now completed this assignment twice, once for each of my student teaching placements. While I think it is a very useful assignment and was effective both times, I definitely would say that it was most effective for this current placement. Being in a foreign country where I did not know the school, community, or culture at all was very intimidating. Asking these questions of my clinical educators and researching as much information as I could on my own helped me become a better teacher, and in the process positively impacted the students I worked with. By learning more about my students' cultures and ecosystems, I was better able to plan developmentally appropriate learning experiences for them. It also had a positive impact on the families, because after learning about the level of family involvement in the school and in my preschool classroom I made an effort to keep this up. I provided families with ELL resources such as those I found on the school's website, and planned a family event in which I posted weekly updates on the class website so that families who couldn't be in the classroom physically could still get a sense of what was happening throughout the day. I do think that my personal philosophy influenced my opinion on how accessible the school's resources for families were. I firmly believe that quality teachers must provide high quality care and education to each child regardless of race, gender, ability, socioeconomic status, or any other factor. I also believe that teachers and schools should support family involvement as much as possible so that children can be supported both at school and at home. With this in mind, I found a few flaws with the accessibility of the resources provided to parents, especially the fact that it would be very challenging for many families who do not speak English to read and understand these resources unless they were able to translate them, and some of the resources were not able to be copied and pasted into a site like Google translate. Despite this, I do think that families were overall very well supported at ACS Athens, which contributed to my love for the school.
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