IA Teaching Standard 7

ENGAGES IN PROFESSIONAL GROWTH.

The teacher:

a. Demonstrates habits and skills of continuous inquiry and learning.

b. Works collaboratively to improve professional practice and student learning.

c. Applies research, knowledge, and skills from professional development opportunities to improve practice.

d. Establishes and implements professional development plans based upon the teacher needs aligned to the Iowa Teaching Standards and district/building student achievement goals.


Development & Delivery of ESL P.D.

I feel my AtlanticESL professional development website demonstrates all criteria of IA Teaching Standard 7.  Providing continued and effective professional development for sheltered English instructors is a challenge. With all the general professional development requirements throughout the year, finding additional time to do ESL-specific training can be difficult. Add to this the ineffectiveness of one-size-fits-all ESL training, and suddenly encouraging sheltered English instructors in their development and use of ESL and English language development strategies in their specific content areas and developmental ages becomes even harder. As ELL Coordinator, I attempted to meet this challenge with an online and statewide collaborative approach that partnered with the best of our state’s sheltered English instructors in a way that could facilitate easier, more effective, and more inspiring continued training. My aim was to strengthen sheltered English instruction in all classrooms by providing a non-threatening, user-friendly, and time-efficient professional development model that targets the specific content and developmental age of each sheltered English instructor. I developed this website to be a go-to location that all of our district's staff and families could utilize in order to all be unified in our understanding and application of best practices for our EL students.  I continuously updated the site with the most recent research, learning, and pedagogy to improve professional practice and student learning.