9. Professionalism, Leadership, & Advocacy

The above artifacts are a video lesson and my subsequent reflection. This was a part of a lesson I taught in my government class, which focused on freedom of speech (the second half can be seen under the "Learning Environment" tab). After I taught the lesson, I reflected on my teaching and how it had changed since I began my student teaching experience in January.

Through these two evaluations, I show that I met Standard 9 in that the competent teacher "reflects on professional practice and resulting outcomes; engages in self-assessment; and adjusts practices to improve student performance, school goals, and professional growth" (9K). This assignment gave me chance to identify how my teaching had changed, and looked for areas where I can improve. It also shows how I adjusted to improve student performance. When I taught this in an earlier class, students weren't really talking to each other, and where just filling out sheets. In this class, I stated that one of the purposes of this assignment was for them to listen, which improved participation.

This assignment is important to my portfolio because it shows how I relfect on my teaching and work towards improving myself as an educator. It shows I look at every aspect of my teaching, from the way I speak to the class and interact with students, to the color marker I use on the board. 

This is a lesson plan I co-wrote and co-taught with one of my peers in out literacy class. The lesson covers how to identify domain names, and is adapted from a lesson plan on the Civic Online Reasoning website.

Through this lesson, I showed that I "model and teach safe, legal, and ethical use of digital information and technology, including respect for copyright, intellectual property, and the appropriate documentation of sources" (9T). The focus of this lesson is using the internet safely, especially when it comes to research and looking for source material.

This lesson helped to teach me the importance of modeling safe use of the internet to my students, which is essential they learn before leaving school. Things like verifying sources is something that I automatically knew how to do going into education, but teaching it students is something entirely different. This activity gave me an opportunity to practice this skill, and allowed me to work on my professional development by researching new strategies to evaluate online sources.