Standard 4 - Learning Environment – The competent teacher structures a safe and healthy learning environment that facilitates cultural and linguistic responsiveness, emotional well-being, self-efficacy, positive social interaction, mutual respect, active engagement, academic risk-taking, self-motivation, and personal goal-setting.

During the course of this class I have been working on a classroom website assignment. It was designed to be an ongoing formative assessment of my understanding of the classroom environment and all that it entails to create a cohesive, complex and rigorous classroom learning environment.

The importance of the website assignment was that I am able to envision situations that I can expect to encounter in the classroom. I don't feel as though I will come in blind to what the management of my classroom will be because I have a foundation of work completed that I could run tomorrow. I have constructed a "healthy learning environment" that also addresses the "emotional well-being" of my students. It will be a proactive "positive" environment" that sets students up for "active engagement" per IPTS Standard 4.

My key take away and cognitive artifact is the creation of our classroom website. I believe that this enhanced my learning as a future teacher because I was continually adding and editing for clarification to ensure that my classroom procedures, management and rules are cohesive with my inspirational theorist and vision. I had to analyze and research to support my vision of what my classroom will be. As a teacher in the future I can not only use the material in my website, but also use the skills I have attained while creating it.

Class Website Link

The artifact below is a video of an English Language Arts lesson. I chose to highlight this video of my student teaching because I believe it shows evidence of a "positive social interaction, mutual respect as well as active engagement." I believe that our interactions with students must come from a place of mutual respect and fondness. It can be difficult for a student to learn when they don't feel respect from the teacher about their thoughts, feelings and emotions. I believe this is evident when a student raised his hand to share that his mom's favorite color was purple. Rather than dismiss his comment from being off topic, I simply stated, "how nice!" and continued with our goals.