Standard 4 - Learning Environment – 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.
Rationale: The artifact is the classroom website that I created. My website includes pages with the following information: Rules and Expectations, Rewards and Consequences, Procedures, Instructional Style and Assessment, Diversity and my contact information. The website was created in April of 2019, during the General Methods class. The purpose was to portray my ideal classroom and express my teaching styles and strategies.
My website shows that as a teacher I have a firm grasp of Illinois Professional Teaching Standard 4, because I have created pages to address different elements of this standard.
4A) understands principles of and strategies for effective classroom and behavior management—I created a webpage on my site with rules and expectations and a page with rewards and consequences.
4C) understands how to help students work cooperatively and productively in group. My page about instructional style talks about how I will help students to work collaboratively by creating an open and respectful environment.
4J) creates clear expectations and procedures for communication and behavior and a physical setting conducive to achieving classroom goals. I have clearly outlined rewards and consequences on my website.
4L) analyzes the classroom environment and makes decisions to enhance cultural and linguistic responsiveness, mutual respect, positive social relationships, student motivation, and classroom engagement. We will learn about other cultures and lifestyles. I will create a classroom environment that is accepting of everyone.
4H) understands the use of student data (formative and summative) to design and implement behavior management strategies. Formative assessment techniques that I will use in my classroom, are clearly outline on my website.
I created this website using Wix. It has been challenging for me, because I do not know much about these kinds of things. I have used Wix in the past to create a website, and both times I have felt that it was not very user friendly. However, I have learned a lot through this experience, and I know that I will be able to create something like this in the future for my real classroom. Creating all these different pages for my website has made me really think about a lot of the things that I would do when I have my own classroom. I believe that having a website for the classroom is a great resource not only for the parents, but also for the parents to use with their children.