Responsibility for Professional Competence demands attentiveness to continuing education requirements and career development.
Professionally competent teachers spend time researching new teaching methods, attend classes to maintain their certifications, consult colleagues for professional advice, stay informed on technical advancements for the classroom, and participate in curriculum improvements. A professionally competent teacher must ensure that their teaching methods are relevant and comprehensive for all students. Professionally competent teachers engage in educational research to continuously improve their strategies in the classroom.
These prerequisites reside where professional learning intersects with professional ethics:
Educators’ commitment to students, all students, is the foundation of effective professional learning.
Each educator involved in professional learning comes to the experience ready to learn.
Because there are disparate experience levels and use of practice among educators, professional learning can foster collaborative inquiry and learning that enhances individual and collective performance.
Like all learners, educators learn in different ways and at different rates.
In Tennessee, all licensed educators are required to earn Professional Development Points in order to renew their license.
To earn PDPs, an activity must be related to improving educator effectiveness by:
Developing content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, or pedagogical content knowledge;
Enhancing educator effectiveness (e.g., world language courses for those working with students for whom English is a second language, or coursework that supports understanding and use of data); or
Developing competency in student social and emotional health and well-being.
Visit TN.GOV Website for more information about PDPs.
The core teaching standards describe what teachers should know and be able to do in today’s learning context to ensure students reach these learning goals. For example, cross-disciplinary skills (e.g., communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and the use of technology) are woven throughout the teaching standards because of their importance for learners. Additionally, the core teaching standards stress that teachers build literacy and thinking skills across the curriculum, as well as help learners address multiple perspectives in exploring ideas and solving problems. The core teaching standards also address interdisciplinary themes (e.g., financial literacy, civic literacy) and the teacher’s ability to design learning experiences that draw upon multiple disciplines.
These standards start with the learner and then move to discuss content knowledge. Teachers must have a deep and flexible understanding of their content areas and be able to draw upon content knowledge as they work with learners to access information, apply knowledge in real world settings, and address meaningful issues to assure learner mastery of the content. Today’s teachers make content knowledge accessible to learners by using multiple means of communication, including digital media and information technology. They integrate cross-disciplinary skills (e.g., critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, communication) to help learners use content to propose solutions, forge new understandings, solve problems, and imagine possibilities. Finally, teachers make content knowledge relevant to learners by connecting it to local, state, national, and global issues.
Standards 6, 7, and 8 focus on Instructional Practice. Effective instructional practice requires that teachers understand and integrate assessment, planning, and instructional strategies in coordinated and engaging ways. Beginning with their end or goal, teachers first identify student learning objectives and content standards and align assessments to those objectives. Teachers understand how to design, implement and interpret results from a range of formative and summative assessments. This knowledge is integrated into instructional practice so that teachers have access to information that can be used to provide immediate feedback to reinforce student learning and to modify instruction. Planning focuses on using a variety of appropriate and targeted instructional strategies to address diverse ways of learning, to incorporate new technologies to maximize and individualize learning, and to allow learners to take charge of their own learning and do it in creative ways.
On the previous page "Ethics in Sight", you can read each standard in detail. If you come across a standard you feel you can always improve upon, make an action plan to learn all you can!