Professional Growth Reflection and Growth Plan

Overall, I feel as though I have grown significantly as an educator. I have found strategies that work for me, planning techniques, and methods that have helped me successfully educate my students. I found in the beginning of my teaching experience I was not loud enough to address a class of 20 kindergarteners when off task, which proved to be a great challenge. At first, I kept trying to talk over the chaos but was unable to gain lasting attention. I realized i would have to workshop methods to combat this issue to ensure student engagement. I found that chants did not work with my personality or teaching persona which led me to the bell. I rang a doorbell every time I need their attention and they responded well after direct instruction and practice acting out "doorbell situations". Just this small thing made my teaching much more effective and my voice much less strained. I have also been put into situations where my plans don’t go well, or my lessons flopped (as most teachers will admit is bound to happen). This has helped me grow as I had to scrap plans and develop new plans or make modifications while simultaneously assessing students understanding to better direct the lesson. These have actually been some of my best lessons and gave me the much-needed experience in assessing students' comprehension throughout each lesson.

A specific professional development activity I have taken part in was self-initiated. I decided I wanted to schedule meetings with many people at the school I did my demonstration teaching at to get to know them, their job, and any tips they could give me. At Monte Vista Elementary, the staff was welcoming and provided an open door and endless advice which I took as an opportunity to further my development as an educator. By creating meetings with staff members, I was able to learn about different positions, education strategies, planning strategies, classroom management strategies, job openings, where to look for lesson plans, and how to develop healthy work habits which all helped me become the educator I am proud to be today.

Meeting with staff members at this school was a good professional development strategy to enhance my use of content pedagogy in the classroom as I was given helpful techniques and strategies to use when teaching. I found a great technology resource for math from grades K-6 called Boddle, which is a fun interactive, confidence building, enrichment app that focuses on students growing their math skills. This resource was incredible in my kindergarten class and helped students engage in mathematics. I am especially excited to incorporate this resource in higher grades as I believe it would help those students struggling in Math. When teaching writing skills, I was told to use a specific resource which instructs writing to be done through discussion which I found very effective and interactive. I was also told to use a website that has tons of lesson plans, activities, and worksheets that are categorized by grade and standards to find fun new inspiration (education.com). This enhanced my lessons and content enormously as I was able to look for lessons and add my own ideas to them knowing my class and what would work best for their needs. These meetings with other professionals enhanced my use of content pedagogy in the class.

A specific example of collaboration with grade-level teams to analyze student data would be meeting with my two team mates to go over student’s assessment results. We assessed students for report card competencies and met afterwards to summarize the data and makes plans to adjust instruction. This data was directly relayed to our principal and the district. This happens four times a year and is designed to help each student meet the objectives.

Meeting with my teammates regarding test results influenced future instruction as we had to make adjustments for students who were not meeting, meeting, and exceeding the standards. We made plans to intervene with students who were exceptionally struggling and made plans for more one-on-one time with these students or higher tier intervention in some cases. For students meeting standards, we made plans to challenge them and expand on these concepts. For students who exceeded the standards and expectations we created plans to challenge them as well and work on more advanced standards they would see in the near future.

The collaboration on student assessment data helped me grow as an educator as I was exposed to differentiating instruction for each level student. Through this collaboration I was taught methods of assessing and methods of differentiation to help each category of students. I also was able to sit in on a data team meeting which gave me incite to higher grades data and their plans for intervention which will be seen in my future higher grade's classroom.

The National Science Teaching Association is an educational organization that has contributed to my development as an educator. Under the Science and children tab, this association provides free resources such as science experiments to help students understand real world issues and also the importance of the natural world. A resource lesson/experiment that contributed to my development as an education was, “The Water We Drink,” resource. This was a step by step, multi-level science experiment for younger kids which taught students about drinking water, aquifers, wells, water retrieval methods, pollution, contamination, filtration, and the importance of water. This resource had so much information to help guide my instruction which helped translate the importance of water, make it relatable, and help students understand their impact. I will use this association in the future to improve science lessons and

A specific goal I am setting for myself to encourage growth as an educator will be to build a strong understanding of the standards in which grade I am teaching and the surrounding grades standards to be able to transform each lesson into a fun, interactive, and engaging lesson that will cover the material but will be memorable and build students excitement for learning. In order to accomplish this goal, I will review the standards, instructional materials and books, practice teaching with instructional material, adding to the basic materials, and expanding my ideas through meetings with fellow teacher’s and searching through online resources. Understanding the standards well enough to transform a lesson into something interesting and engaging isn’t the easiest task but I feel it is a powerful way to grow as an educator and help students grow as life long learners.