Context

Part I:

I have taught for 13 years: seven years in first grade, four years in third grade, and two years in fourth grade. I’ve taught at two different schools. I started my career teaching 1st grade, and then eventually 3rd grade at a rural Title I school in Arizona with a high percentage of English Language Learners. After nine years I moved back home to Montana where I’ve been at my current school for the last 4 years teaching first and then fourth grade. The socio-economic status of our students is quite varied and we are seeing increasing numbers of English Language Learners in our district. Though our teacher turnover rate isn’t too high, we currently have quite a few teachers retiring in our district leading to a large amount of new hires for the upcoming school year.

I’ve been actively involved in all areas of education including curriculum development and alignment, professional development, and technology integration. I currently serve a leadership role in my district with my participation on our curriculum development and standards based reporting team. I also plan and develop professional development in the area of technology for my school and district as well as participating in many forms of professional development on my own time. This fall I will be providing professional development at the statewide level at the MFPE Educator Conference.

Coaches Capstone Approval Form and Certification Bank Code.docx

Part II:

Before starting this journey I only looked at biases in terms of racial or religious bias and didn’t think that I had biases. However, after many discussions on this in our online meetings, I realized that I do hold some pretty strong biases based on my personal values. I highly value reflection and growth in the teaching field and often struggle to connect with others who don’t share these values. I tend to shut down and not share my ideas or beliefs. I also value collaboration, so I don’t want this to become the norm for me. Because of this I’ve decided to start a monthly face to face meeting as well as an online forum for our new hires. While it won’t be a one-to-one mentorship, I hope that this will help the new hires build relationships with each other, start to grow their own Personal Learning Network while in turn fostering a culture of learning, reflection, and collaboration in my district.

Another awareness that I’ve developed throughout this process is that while I don’t believe that I hold biases toward other cultures, races, religions, etc., I also haven’t done a good job of being an advocate or using my voice to speak up for others. I have been in some situations where others have made comments about others race, religion, etc. and though it makes me uncomfortable I fear the conflict and don’t speak up. This is something that I’m constantly working on and I know that in the process of developing this mentorship program these things might come up and I need to be prepared to have hard conversations.

Chosen Competencies

  • Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emerging, I chose emerging in this competency because I have a strong personal vision for the profession in terms of association, instruction and policy and have the skills to support colleagues but hadn't yet built relationships built on trust or created a shared vision to help students.
  • Adult Learning, Emerging, I chose emerging for this competency because before starting this process I hadn’t done any research on how adults learn. I feel like in this competency area I was really starting from scratch.
  • Collaborate Purposefully, Developing, I chose developing for this competency. I feel that creating a learning environment for students and adults to include and value cultures beyond their own is one of my strengths.
  • Facilitating Collaborative Relationships, Developing, Through my work with our curriculum mapping team and professional learning communities, I feel that I’m developing in this area. We frequently engage in collaborative discussion about learning and teaching and establish data-based structures to engage with each other about practice. We’re also in the process of developing our professional learning communities and refining our practices.

My stakeholders for this capstone are the new hires in my district who will be participating in our mentorship meetings, our curriculum director, and principals who I’ve worked with to get the ball rolling. Outside the district I’ve reached out to several friends who teach in teacher preparation programs, as well as Nikki Vradenburg with Montana PBS, and a professor at MSU who teaches a course on mentorship. Because I’m starting this from scratch I anticipate my instructional mindset will change quite a bit. I have to be okay with having some failures. I know this won’t go perfectly and I need to model the reflection and growth mindset process that I hope this will help foster in the new hires.

This year we are hiring a lot of new teachers in our district from all over the U.S. and with all levels of teaching and life experience. While I don’t know the teachers I will be working with yet, I am excited to get to know them and tap into the strengths that they will bring to our district because of their experience, background, or culture. I am sending out a survey to new hires to see how many years of experience they have as well as what their strengths are. One of our monthly meetings is going to be an Ed Cafe similar to EdCamp where teachers will get a chance to share their knowledge with others.