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.
This artifact is a classroom website that I designed as a project for my General Methods course. It includes a list of classroom rules and consequences, incentives, parent welcome letter, procedures and more. I used class websites from different school districts to guide my design, and used the Wix platform to create the website.
This website meets Indicator 4D, which states that the competent teacher "understands factors (e.g., self-efficacy, positive social interaction) that influence motivation and engagement." This site has a section that is titled "Motivation" in which different theories having to do with student motivation are discussed, including the growth mindset. This encourages self-efficacy in students, and can change the way they think about their work and themselves. I also encouraged positive social interaction in my posted Classroom Rules, which highlight treating others with respect and paying attention to the way students treat their peers.
I learned a lot from creating this artifact. It was a great way to think about what rules were most important to me as a classroom teacher, and how I wanted to handle discipline. It also allowed me to be creative, to put myself into the design, and to show my personality through my work, which I believe is important as an educator.
This artifact is a lesson I taught during my first student teaching placement in a middle school environment. The lesson focused on how and why people move from place to place. I incorporated discussion and group work into this lesson, which included thoughtfully picking which students would work together.
This lesson meets Indicator 4P, which states that the competent teacher "modifies the learning environment (including the schedule and physical arrangement) to facilitate appropriate behaviors and learning for students with diverse learning characteristics." I taught this lesson to 6 different groups of students. For each group, I had to carefully think about how I would group the students, based on several different factors. These included: student behaviors, the tone of students' interactions, who got along and who didn't, and who might distract the others from their work. I wanted the kids to read and answer the questions in the assignment thoughtfully. Finally, I tried to group the students based on who I thought would distribute the workload evenly - I did not want one person in each group doing all of the tasks. The result was that each class period looked a little different: the honors group worked in groups of 3 or 4, while other class periods worked in partners. Some groups were paired based on proximity, others very deliberately. In these ways, I modified each learning environment that I taught.
I learned a lot from teaching this lesson. It showed me how making small changes to a lesson based on the different students you have can make the experience better for everyone - teachers and staff included. By grouping students with behavior issues thoughtfully, one class ran smoother, and by switching from larger groups to partners, a chatty group was able to stay on task.