Standard 6: Engage in professional learning

6.1-Identify and plan professional learning needs

Use the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers and advice from colleagues to identify and plan professional learning needs.

6.2-Engage in professional learning and improve practice

Participate in learning to update knowledge and practice, targeted to professional needs and school and/or system priorities.

6.3-Engage with colleagues and improve practice

Contribute to collegial discussions and apply constructive feedback from colleagues to improve professional knowledge and practice.

6.4-Apply professional learning and improve student learning

Undertake professional learning programs designed to address identified student learning needs.

For standard six, I have chosen to present my evidence differently. Rather than having one piece of evidence for each area I have decided to have two pieces that I feel cover each focus area.

DECD: Graduate to Proficient/ eportfolio training and mentoring

When I was given my first teaching contract in 2013, I was invited to a DECD Early Career Teacher meet and greet event. At this event I was able to engage and network with other early career teachers. At this event, I started learning about the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. I realized that these would be an important part of my practice and that I needed to learn more about them. I registered for two DECD workshops: Graduate to Proficient and portfolio training. These workshops gave me a good understanding of the APST and what I needed to do to go for my full teaching registration. I found that I had a bit of a knack for navigating the Google sites eportfolio and ended up helping many other teachers at the training. As a result of this, I have been invited back to several DECD workshops as a 'mentor'. Through this, I have been able to stay in touch with new information delivered at the workshops and network with more teachers. Below are some photos at DECD events I have been a part of.

In this photo, I had been asked to attend another Graduate to Proficient workshop and be part of an early career teacher panel to offer advice and wisdom form my first year of teaching.

These two photos show me acting as an eportfolio mentor at two eportfolio training sessions. During these sessions, I share my eportfolio with teachers before helping them begin to set their eportfolios up.

I have also run my own eportfolio session at my current site and gave advice on using eportfolios to display evidence of teaching against the APST.

Guided Reading

After many discussions within my site and with my Professional Learning Team (PLT), I decided that I wanted to undertake more PD to improve my practice in teaching reading. Our school has been using the Daily CAFE program which I have found great for using with students but was having trouble having time to listen to all students and work on strategies with groups or individuals. I began guided reading groups but I had little experience and while they went ok, I saw lots of room for improvement.

Some changes I made to my program after a workshop with Margaret Menner was to stop 'Round Robin' reading and take time to listen to each student. This meant that students stayed engaged in their reading and I saw a better improvement in group discussion. I made sure that I introduce each book well so that students knew what vocab to expect and what strategy we would practise using.

I also made sure that my other groups were doing reading based activities that they found fun and engaging. These included going online to do Reading Eggs, playing sight word games and making Trading Cards about characters or animals in books they read.