STANDARD 4: LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

The artifact above is a book report assignment presented to students during an English class where I was given the opportunity to be a maternity leave substitute. For this assignment students were expected to talk about the book MAUS which is about a story from a survivor of the Holocaust. Students are asked to summarize the book as well as talk about the Holocaust in their own words.

Standard 4 is about the learning environment within the classroom and making sure the teacher "structures a safe and healthy learning environment that facilitates cultural and linguistic responsiveness". In this artifact, it is seen that students are expected to understand the cultural aspect of the book MAUS from the different cultures presented in the book. It connects to the standard because when students are working on this project they are being asked to understand things from a different cultural perspective. This is being done through a positive structured manner within a classroom where it is being presented from a learning perspective for the students. Students are actively engaged in learning and understanding different cultures.

Through this activity, I was able to learn that there is a safe and healthy way to introduce topics with such drastic implications in different ways. This helps students learn things that may be hard to comprehend a hard topic and presents it in an educational manner where students can use their own schema to understand what the book was about as well as the time period in which this book had taken place. In my future classroom, I will be able to take a project like this and recreate it in different forms to possibly help understand different cultural perspectives.

This check in is a document that I used a few times throughout the semester to understand how my students were feeling. This can help with social and emotional learning of your students.

Standard 4 is all about the learning environment of your classroom. Making sure the teacher is taking into account the emotional well-being of the students as well as many other things. The standard states, "facilitates cultural and linguistic responsiveness, emotional well-being". It is important to understand your student's well-being because you want to make sure that you understand your students to the best of your ability. By doing this worksheet you are able to understand the emotional well-being of your own students. This is also a great way to spread put the material in the classroom when you are focusing so much on business this takes a step back and lets you focus on the emotional standpoint of the student.

Through this activity, I was able to learn so much about myself as a teacher and so much about my students. I never truly understood the importance of the emotional well-being of the students. This can help build a strong relationship with your students and help you to understand each student from a different perspective. Social and emotional learning can be hard to implement within the business classroom but doing a check-in like this it helps cover the social and emotional learning of the student.