Standard 8 - Collaborative Relationships – The competent teacher builds and maintains collaborative relationships to foster cognitive, linguistic, physical, and social and emotional development. This teacher works as a team member with professional colleagues, students, parents or guardians, and community members
This artifact was created for ASPED330, Communication and Collaboration in Special Education. It is an extensive plan created for the parents or guardians of my students. It includes a parent introduction letter and different strategies to promote effective communication with my students' families.
Throughout my courses at Trinity, my professors spoke often about the importance of collaboration with our future team. A team of teachers working together can brainstorm in order to create the best plan for a student or group of students, in order to help them thrive and reach their goals. While this is a crucial part of teaching, I also strongly believe in the power of collaboration between teachers and parents. Parents know their children best, and with effective communication, I believe that parents can be an extremely valuable asset in the mission to reach a student's goals. That is why this artifact aligns with Standard 8. The standard states, "This teacher works as a team member with professional colleagues, students, parents or guardians, and community members."
This assignment gave me a better understanding of the importance of parent and teacher relationships. Creating this plan gave me a great starting point for how to form meaningful relationships with my students' families, so that we can work together as a team to help each student reach their goals.
Paraprofessional Communication Plan
This is an artifact produced for ASPED330, Communication and Collaboration in Special Education. It is a detailed plan which includes strategies to promote better communication between paraprofessionals and teachers in a Special Education setting. The information provided is based upon research and my own experiences as a paraprofessional.
This artifact aligns with Standard 4, because it states, "The competent teacher builds and maintains collaborative relationships to foster cognitive, linguistic, physical, and social and emotional development." This plan could help teachers and paraprofessionals collaborate in an organized and efficient way that would benefit the students. From my own experience being a paraprofessional for 4 years, I know that they often know information about a student that no one else does. I worked as a one to one aid, so I followed my student the entire school day. I witnessed every accomplishment, as well as every trigger or meltdown that occurred each day. My knowledge was valuable to the classroom teacher, and helped her to create appropriate action plans for the student. A lot of the information implemented from this plan was inspired by situations I encountered as a paraprofessional, and I plan to use a similar plan in my own classroom.
This assignment helped me to search deeper into the importance of communicating with paraprofessionals. I will use my work from this assignment to help me create a communication plan to help form an effective team between myself and the paraprofessionals in the classroom.