Standard 9 - Professionalism, Leadership, and Advocacy – The competent teacher is an ethical and reflective practitioner who exhibits professionalism; provides leadership in the learning community; and advocates for students, parents or guardians, and the profession.
This first artifact is a Parent/Guardian Letter for a job that I accepted starting Spring 2023. It also modeled the letter that I sent to parents to introduce myself as the student teacher. The purpose of this artifact was to not only introduce myself to parents and guardians, but also be proactive in beginning to build our communicative and collaborative relationship.
Indicator 9 states that a teacher "communicates with families, responds to concerns, and contributes to enhanced family participation in student education". The artifact above was created and sent to parents as both a hand out and email in order to begin to establish a positive parent-teacher relationship. I decided to keep it brief, as the overall goal is to introduce myself to the parents and offer contact info to initiate more personal and student-oriented conversation. As a special educator, collaborating and daily communicating with parents is crucial so that we can work together. I wanted to initiate contact to then discuss how parents and guardians would like to receive daily communication. For example, would they prefer an email or daily communication log.
While developing this letter, I ultimately wanted parents and guardians to be aware of a new change in teacher for their child so we can begin to prepare for the transition that will come in January. By sending this letter prior to starting, I am not only hoping to set a positive tone that creates active communication throughout the school year but I am also trying to be proactive with my communication to show the level of importance it holds in my practice.
This artifact was developed during my time as a student teacher in Fall of 2022. I reflected each week on what happened, what I learned, and also set goals for myself. Some weeks the goals remained the same while others came with new ones. It was beneficial to sit down and just reflect on my week as a whole, as my time student teaching went by so quickly.
My weekly reflections align with performance indicator 9K, which is that a 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". These reflections gave me time to think about the lessons I created and teaching strategies that I used. It was also a great space for me to record strategies and approaches that different teachers and even districts used that I would like to incorporate into my future experiences.
As I move toward becoming a teacher of my own classroom, I plan to utilze the strategy of weekly reflections in order to offer me insight on my personal strengths, weaknesses, and goals that I wish to have. This strategy can help me with personal growth and self-assessment and will allow me to continue to see myself as a lifelong learner.