Professional Growth Reflection & Growth Plan

Looking at my road traveled as a teacher, I have attained a considerable understanding of personal and professional growth. My understanding of the daily functions and the different course of action that needs to come together has intensified between teaching methods, learning activities, learning assessments, curriculum, and relationships. I have fully integrated different teaching practices to help increase students' involvement and enhance their learning outcomes. 

One particular professional development I participated in was several was several Orton-Gillingham Science of Reading workshops. These workshops have enhanced my understanding of  the science of reading and phonics and how to teach it. The workshops focused on how language comprehension and word recognition come together to form a competent reader. They accentuate the importance of targeting areas like phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. They discussed the importance of early interventions in younger grades, executing weekly assessments to monitor student's growth. Throughout the workshop, there were science of reading opportunities for us to engage in discourse and activities that were designed to help us understand how to teach through the Science of Reading. An essential takeaway from the workshops was how every day, the lessons should include the decodable reader, spelling, grammar, and a writing lesson that all coordinate to target the student's goals. By fully adapting the Science of Reading, it will lead to students being able to comprehend reading across all different texts. This workshop gave me evidence-based strategies and a different perspective on teaching reading. Allowing me to deliver targeted, explicit, and systematic instruction. 

I had the privilege to observe a grade level Professional Learning Community(PLC) Meeting discussing students reading comprehension levels. Each teacher had data on where every student's reading level was at the beginning of the year to the current time, their student's star reading ratings from all school year, and their site word accuracy. The teachers compared these numbers across the classes, and then the instructional coach showed the teachers where students should be at this point of the school year. Collaborating and sharing each other's data  has helped me grow as an educator by seeing how we all came together as a team and came up with ways to help the students academically. This has shown me that occasionally, even when in the middle of a school year, we need to modify our curriculum to fit the needs of our students. Seeing all this data and how the teachers collaborate has helped me grow as an educator. Team collaboration has been a vital part of my teaching experience through evaluating  and adapting student's needs, reflecting on our practices, and adjusting the curriculum. As a team, we discussed how to move forward with future lessons starting the following week to help target student engagement. We decided to add more phonemic awareness into the curriculum and break the students up into smaller groups to focus on specific learning skills. John C. Maxwell said it best: "Teamwork makes the dream work". (Maxwell, 2002). 

As an educator, I am consistently seeking different types of professional organizations that will help me grow as a teacher. As an educator who has a passion for special education, I found CEC, the Council of Exceptional Children, a professional organization that supports high-quality teaching and learning for educators and students and has supported me through my teaching. A certain example of how the CEC has supported me is through their online webinars. They always offer CECommunity to connect with other educators and professionals to engage and communicate with  and gain insights from teachers from all over also to voice opinions and give different ideas. Another webinar that I enjoyed was the Independence/Life Skills  which provided ideas and resources for teaching students the resources provided have helped me enrich my classroom. I am appreciative of this organization as it strives for high-quality resources and ideas while promoting collaboration which has helped foster my professional growth as an educator.

In my venture as an elementary teacher, I am committed to continuing my professional growth. A particular goal as an educator that I want to focus on is cultivating my growth mindset. There are a few things as an educator that can help me grow in my growth mindset. The first activity that I have already started was setting S.M.A.R.T goals. Another thing I have done was reach out to the administration and ask them to stop in and observe me while teaching and to give me their feedback. I want to flourish as an educator to become the best teacher that I can and the only way I can do this is by continually cultivating my growth mindset.