4. The competent teacher structures a safe and healthy learning environment that facilitates cultural and linguistic responsiveness, emotional well-being, self-efficacy, positive social interaction, mutual respect, active engagement, academic risk-taking, self-motivation, and personal goal-setting.
Artifact
This artifact is a website I created for my future classroom. I created this as an assignment for my Special Education Teaching Methods class (SPED 380). Creating this website required me to consider all aspects of my ideal future classroom from seating arrangements to rules and expectations and teaching/assessment models to parental communication and diversity. This assignment not only required me to consider my own desired classroom, but it also asked me to reserch popular theorists and their beliefs to reference and support my opinoins. This led me to deeper learning and understanding of the behaviour and learning theories and propelled me forward in my thinking of how and why I chose the theorists I did. I realized some theorists meld well with each other while others don't. This observation caused me to appriciate my own teacing style and to self reflect on why I may tend to lean more toward the "democratic", community based classroom theories. They suit my nature and the the teaching style I think I will have to begin with.
Rationale/Standard Connection
This assisgnment fostered my knowledge about creating a safe and healthy learning environment and led me to directly meeting Illinois Professional Teaching Standard (ITPS) 4 - Learning Environment "The competent teacher strutures a safe and healthy environment that facilitates cultural and linguistic responsiveness, emotional well-being, self-efficacy, positive social interaction, mutual respect, active engagement, acedemic risk taking, self motivation and personal goal-setting". I considered all aspects in the description of requirements listed above such as creating clear expectations and procedures for communication and behavior which meets Standard 4 Learning Performance Indicator B. I considered what was needed to provide a physical setting that will be conducive learning while remaining flexible in thought to accomdate any situation that may arise which leads to my meeeting Learning Performance Indicator 4.A (providing a safe a healthy environment). Learning Performance Indicator 4.D is met as responsivness to student needs is a priority in my future classroom so diversity and respect are major points addressesd in my webpage to make my classroom a safe place for all to learn and feel powerful in their own skin. The "How I Teach" page explains how I plan to engage, motivate and monitor individual and group learning. I plan to use appropriate consequesnces for positive and negative behaviors suited to the needs of all students (Standard 4 Learning Performance Indicator G). This part of my website may appear vaugue but that is intentional and by design. Just as I believe all students learn differently, they also have different norms and backgrounds which can cause them to be motivated differently. I plan to be patient, explain and reenforce my rules often and I believe communication with the student and family when necesary will help teach students to conduct themselves properly. For these reasons, I beleive I have met IPTS 4 by completeing my website assignment.
Reflection
This class (Professor Jennifer Ramirez's SPED 380 specifically) has taught me about many different ways children learn and about different needs, and most importantly how to meet them as a teacher. It has taught me strategies to teach and differentiate lessons in many ways by her expert use of examples. Without the constant effort she put into actually showing us the use of different tools, I would not have learned some strategies to meet students' needs and theses strategies woulsn't seem so "doable". It has been said before that we learn by example, but I have been reminded of this in this class. The creation of this website along with the teachings and assignments has led me to active engagemnt, self-motivation and personal goal setting so I believe I am a step closer to being able to do this for my future students. My specific reflection about creating this website is that it was a bit of a struggle becuase this is obviously not a real classroom. It would be easier for me to have a real situation to focus on, however I do not believe I would have ever thought of all of these important aspects of creating a learning environment without this assignment. Additionally, now I know how to create a website which is something I have never even fathomed myself doing. I believe I will use this skill in the future wheter it be for my actual classroom or even for a book reading I do. I can imagine creating a website with resources for the students to reveiw after reading a book as a class. It can be created and used to help the students make connections about some of the concepts of the book or follow up on characters if it is non-fiction. I enjoyed this assignment and look forward to creating another, better website in the future.