CSTP Growth & Development 

Areas of Strength

 After teaching for a year I have found that I have multiple areas of strength. These include being  patient, approachable, enthusiastic. I also found that my strong knowledge base and solid educational foundation allow me to use multiple approaches to teach my students. However, what I find most important is my ability to relate to the students and talk to them on a personal, individualized, basis that relates directly to each students. This is supported by our conversations about life outside of school, likes, dislikes, hopes, dream, goals and many more details unique to each student. 

Opportunities for Continuous Improvement

 One of the areas that I feel like I can use additional improvement is UDL (universal design of learning).  When people talk about UDL it is often for the students who are struggling to grasp a subject. However, I feel like I need a better focus and improvement on diversifying my lessons so they I can teach better to advanced students.  I have a student in my class who often finished assignment in half the time of his peers. As a rusult, I am usually trying to find additional work in order to bolster his understanding of more advanced material. Unfortunately, I often find myself thinking that I did not support his advancement as much of the rest of the class that needs to get on grade level. This is something I definately want to improve on. 

What I Am Most Proud of

I am most proud of building the relationships with students so that they want to learn and understand their abilities. 

A perfect examps is an ELL student that I had. He was not a fan of reading or writing and we were able to get him to achieve the highest growth in the entire class. His iReady score skyrocketed and he achieved his regular and stretch growth goal. The excitement on his face was worth all of the effort.

I also had another student who HATED math. He felt that he simple was not good at it and that he could never overcome it.  He also had a loose support system at home as he was being raised by his sister because his mother and father were not present. Dispite all of his negative thoughts and the struggle to find him support, we were able to raise his score the most in the entire class. He went up over a grade level in his abilities and almost his his stretch growth. He achieved the highest growth in the class.