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 is a communication plan that I created during my Communication and Collaboration class. The main focus of this plan is to communication through conflict. As educators, communication with various parties is a huge part of our job. This assignment offered us the ability of scenarios of conflict that we may face with other educators, parents, or paraprofessionals.
The discussion about teacher and paraprofessional communication aligns with performance indicator 8K, which discusses that a competent teacher "participates in collaborative decision-making and problem-solving with colleagues and other professionals to achieve success for all students". One of my main takeaways from this project in regard to teacher and paraprofessional conflict is that it may be due to lack of communication and understanding. Rather than just telling a paraprofessional a new plan, communication why that plan is in place and modeling how it can be both beneficial and implemented is key.
This project also focused heavily on parent and teacher relationships, which aligns with performance indicator 8P, which is to "develop professional relationships with parents and guardians that result in fair and equitable treatment of each student to support growth and learning". Proactive communication and problem solving is a key component when working with parents. Parents should be involved in their child's education and it is part of our job to invite them to collaborate. This collaboration can benefit the student and create more areas of growth when all parties are on the same page.
During my Critical Issues in Special Education course, our class completed a mock IEP. This artifact was completed as team members to improve on our IEP writing skills as well as communication and collaboration. We also held an IEP meeting with a "parent" to get better practice professional communication the components of an IEP. It's important to note that all information provided in this IEP is fiction and does not reflect an actual individual.
This artifact provides evidence for knowledge indicator 8S, stating that a competent teacher "participates in the design and implementation of individualized instruction for students with special needs (i.e., IEPs, IFSP, transition plans, Section 504 plans), ELLs, and students who are gifted". During this assignment, we wrote the student's Present Level of Academic Achievement and Functional Performance statement given information provided to us about the student. It became apparent how important collaboration among all team members is while creating an IEP as well as sharing it out during our mock meeting.
This was great practice for me as the process of writing an IEP is challenging and sometimes overwhelming but is going to also be one of the most important parts of my job as a special educator. However, having a team to write the IEP with and bounce goals and ideas off of made this process feel less overwhelming than when I had to write one alone for a previous class. It taught me that even as the teacher I am not alone in creating and presenting the IEP and that is a very comforting feeling.