DESCRIPTION: I attended a professional workshop led by Dr. Juliette Longchamp on March 28, 2019 at the Vermont-NEA office in Montpelier, Vermont. The workshop addressed important issues concerning professional decision making, boundaries and how this impacts the safety and well-being of children, as well as the culture and mission of the school. It was an in-depth training that lasted 3.5 hours and explored strategies to develop appropriate boundaries to maintain employee effectiveness and to protect the integrity of both student and teacher.

ANALYSIS & REFLECTION: This was an immensely helpful training attended by five people bringing different experiences to the room. There was ample time for group discussion and learning from each other. The workshop leader, Dr. Longchamp was extremely well versed on the topic and provided a resource folder containing pertinent information as well as helpful tips and resources. This training exceeded my expectations and I am glad I attended.

We began with introductions and then proceeded with content through a power point presentation that was also outlined in our folders as well. A main point that was brought up early is that the socio-emotional needs of students are greater than ever, more than even 5 years ago. This aspect of education and youth development interests me greatly.

Visible in my community is the impact on children of generational poverty and trauma. More recently, the opiate epidemic and resulting poverty. In my work as an educator, youth advocate and mentor over the past 25 years, I have been driven to work towards helping youth succeed, especially those born into challenging situations. I am passionate about working towards bridging socio-emotional learning with the academic skills necessary to succeed, which is evidenced in many of my projects including a youth empowerment program I have founded called, "Spread Your Wings."

Overall the training explored how to positively maintain boundaries in the school environment, which is a work place rich with emotions, as pointed out by Dr. Longchamp. Attention was given to disruptive learning environments and how to handle a variety of behavioral situations. As well, the need to prepare teachers to deal with this new reality was underlined and the need for this to be part of professional conversations happening between colleagues at all meetings. Workshop participants had real-life stories to share which I found very helpful. It became clear, and was specifically shared by one participant, that it is important to have supportive and professional administrators at the school where you are working in order to effectively do your job as an educator.

The presence of cell phones was an issue that several participants brought up, and I have questions regarding if policies regarding this vary school by school, as I imagine they do. Where I have recently been doing a "teaching collaborative," with a High School French teacher in Middlebury, there were only a couple instances when she had to remind students to put them away and it was not an overriding distraction. Thus, when interviewing for positions, I will be certain to clarify their policies around this as well as laptop computers.

We discussed how a teacher must be quick thinking and makes many many decisions each day. Dr. Longchamp cited Charlotte Danielson, an educational leader who has observed that teachers make over 3,000 decisions a day. I found it very helpful to be reminded that, when one's internal thermometer has risen, nothing helpful comes. Clearly, great self-awareness and self-care is needed for this profession.

Several concrete strategies were highlighted to maintain professionalism such as:

• Finding out what your specific school policies are regarding boundaries
• Establishing clear boundaries in physical, verbal, emotional and information sharing realms
• Establishing clear class expectations - "they need to know you are in charge."
• Maintaining professional relationships with students, as well as with parents and other educators
• Taking care of one's own emotional needs
• Bringing a student to the nurse who may divulge private health related information
• Seeking support for a student with the school social worker, and in essence, remembering we are teachers and not school counselors. There is a network of employees there for the student.
• Appropriate social media communication
• Use of one's professional email address as opposed to personal
• "Look and Listen" Technique to regulate one's own emotions (with hands on your desk/breathing)

We also reviewed the MCEE, The Model Code of Ethics for Educators. I had the chance to work with two others on an informative and interactive exercise around the five guiding principles of this model. I understand this is a national model that will be going into practice in Vermont in the Fall of 2020 and that up until recently the teaching profession, as such, did not have nationwide ethical standards (Please see more on this in Standard # 9.3).

In searching for more information regarding how this dovetails with the Vermont Code of Ethics for Education, I found the following document from the Agency of Education, detailing the evolution of professional standards and ethics for educators in Vermont.

A discussion of different types of boundaries took place such as physical, verbal, emotional and information sharing. Examples of situations were presented on the large screen, and we were to decide if a boundary was crossed or not. One humorous example was shown to illustrate a non-example of using sick leave. In addition, we also went over the important responsibility of mandatory reporting of suspected child abuse and/or neglect or of a vulnerable adult. YOU have to make the call within 24 hrs to the Department of Children & Families for youth. Dr. Longchamp directed us to a good section on the AOE website to read further about this.

Reflecting upon this training, it was very useful and I am feeling more prepared knowing this important information. When I was a student, several teachers as mentors/friends played important roles in my life, and boundaries were not as well defined. However, it is now clear to me that those relationships I had with teachers may be outdated and inappropriate in today's student-teacher climate. I also volunteer as a mentor to youth, and have for years, seeing some of these children when I do teaching residencies, after school programs or substitute teach. It will be a new dynamic to navigate if I have them in my school classroom.

As I develop as a teacher, I would like to continue to pursue learning opportunities around this topic. This evidence demonstrates my mastery of this standard because of the professional learning undertaken around the Model Code of Ethics for educators as well as applicable strategies and learning from other teachers in attendance about professional boundaries and learner safety overall.

DESCRIPTION: Here is a certificate of a professional training I attended on English language learners. It was held by the Burlington Kids Afterschool Program at the Miller Center in Burlington's New North End. Also included is the presentation outline. It was led by Mary Kay O'Brien who is an English Language Learning Teacher at the Sustainability Academy in the Burlington School District. It was a very engaging and useful workshop as I was working, and had been for a number of years, with students from all over the globe.

ANALYSIS/REFLECTION: This training focused on working with students for whom English was not their native language. It was given by the Burlington School Kids Afterschool program, for which I have been a teacher for 13 years, leading a variety of classes and projects across several schools. Mary Kay O'Brien, the training leader, was an engaging presenter and provided several opportunities to grasp the topic.

To begin the presentation she invited us to think about how our English Learning students might feel. Ms. O'Brien read the book, Sylvester and the Magic Stone, as a metaphor for these students. Sylvester is trapped in the form of a big rock and cannot break free. At the end of the story, she provided each of us with a red magic stone. It was a powerful visual and tactile tool to reinforce the lesson that much potential is waiting inside everyone.

She stressed the importance of providing a visual outline or schema. A schema is a general idea about something and helps students learn. She addressed activating prior knowledge and linking new information to old information for greater understanding and asked us what several strategies to do this might be. This was helpful to have an active, reciprocal training. One participant talked about having them share, if they wanted to, something about themselves. I suggested the idea of providing an opportunity to draw an image of where they came from and sharing that.

Ms. O'Brien presented a form of assessment called WIDA, “World-class Instructional Design and Assessment” standards. It is a tool to assess and support students in developing the English language skills necessary to be successful. She provided a chart outlining the different levels of proficiency in the "Speaking Domain," and suggested we could use this chart to assess where our students were in their speaking acquisition skills.

I thoroughly enjoyed this interactive workshop and went on to use this in a number of classes I have led since. As Burlington is a designated Refugee Resettlement location, we have a rich variety of students from over 40 different countries. Also, having lived in both Paris, France and in Yaounde, Cameroon, I am passionate about cultural diversity and all we can learn from it. I plan to continue to work with diverse students that bring so much to our communities and further my learning around diversity, implicit bias and tolerance building through professional learning opportunities. This shows my mastery of this standard because of the training attended and knowledge gained.

Click here for Teaching Standard #9.2