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.
Artifact 1
The above was a lesson planned by myself and my cooperating teacher during my time as a student-teacher. While I mostly taught the lesson, my cooperating teacher also took part in the teaching. We discussed the plan a few days before we taught the lesson and then wrote the lesson together. We ended up having to make some edits to the lesson plan because it ended up taking more time than we thought, and so we made those edits together as well.
Illinois Professional Teaching standard 8N states that the competent teacher "uses effective co-planning and co-teaching techniques to deliver instruction to each student." When planning the lesson, we discussed what we wanted to accomplish through this lesson: gradually releasing students into annotating on their own. We discussed different ways that we could do that and decided to go with the "I do, we do, you do" method. After each day, we briefly discussed how things went and what if any changes needed to be made to the next day's plan. If a class went really well or really bad, we discussed what happened before the next class came in and came up with possible solutions to any issues that arose.
I learned through working with my cooperating teacher how best to take individual students and each class into account when planning a lesson. If a lesson or part of a lesson would not work for a particular student or a particular class, then the lesson or part of the lesson may have to look different for that class or that student might need some type of support to keep them focused and help them succeed in that lesson. I also learned how to use the knowledge of my partner to consider plans from different perspectives or to consider problems that I hadn't thought of.
Artifact 2
South Shore Neighborhood Econ IRB Application
The above institution review board (IRB) application was created during the spring of my junior year of college for a class called Honors Team Research. The class worked together to create an IRB application and conduct interviews with people and organizations involved in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, discussing housing equity and the incoming Obama Center and how this would impact the neighborhood. We divided the IRB application into sections and each group was responsible for their section of the IRB application; we would bring these sections together into the final version of the IRB application. My group was responsible for creating the consent form, creating the list of interview questions, and combining the different sections into the final version of the IRB Application. The two professors leading the project made final edits to the application and submitted the application that is linked above. My group was also responsible for interviewing at least one individual and/or organization in the South Shore neighborhood.
Illinois Professional Teaching Standard 8K states that the competent teacher "participates in collaborative decision-making and problem-solving with colleagues and other professionals." This class was a semester-long collaborative research project with students from the Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior classes at Trinity. We also worked with our professors as well as the individuals we interviewed to learn more about the issue of housing equity in the South Shore and what solutions were already at work and what solutions could potentially be implemented in the future.
I learned a lot about housing equity, what it means and especially what the lack of it means. I also learned about what goes into getting an experiment or research project involving human subjects approved. It's a lot; you have to consider the costs to yourself and your subjects, the benefits to yourself or your institution and your subjects, and how to nullify or avoid any possible costs. I think this was possibly the most stressful project I have ever done, but it was definitely a lot easier since I wasn't doing this alone.