The competent teacher builds and maintains collaborative relationships to foster cognitive, linguistic, physical, and social and emotional development. This teacher works as a team member with professional colleagues, students, parents or guardians, and community members.
Rationale:
Above are two artifacts. The first is a lesson plan. This lesson plan was made November 10, 2022. This was to introduce a whole new unit in a physical science class that was co-taught. In this lesson, the co-teacher and myself talked about why we decided to become teachers, taught the students about the growth mindset, and had them write about how they view their own mindsets. The second artifact is a presentation that was made December 7, 2022 on Newton's laws of motion. I noticed how hard it would be to give lectures and have the students take notes without dozing off or being bored out of their minds. As a result, I tried to spice things up by making this lecture interactive with memes, questions, practice, and demonstrations.
The first artifact fulfills the requirements of "[building and maintaining] collaborative relationships to foster cognitive, linguistic, physical, and social and emotional development" in a few ways. Firstly, this is a lesson that was co-taught. The co-teacher and I had a single day of notice that we would be teaching together. We really quickly had to build a relationship and a method for doing it well. Secondly, we not only sought to build relationship with one another, but we also sought to foster development in our students by modeling our lives to them and having them critically think about their current thought process. The second artifact also aimed at teaching as relationship instead of content transfer. Lectures can be boring, I know. This was made specifically to try to get the students engaged and involved in the process because is that not the reason that we have education?
The students responded very positively to both of these artifacts. Regarding the first artifact, some students really poured out their hearts in their written responses about their mindsets. One student talked to me on the side and asked that the co-teacher and I would please respond to their writings. I did just that and spend hours reading over each and every one intently and responded by writing a completely unique and personalized letter to each student. For the second artifact, the students actually paid attention for the entire 50-minute lecture! This is basically unheard of in this school. I believe that it worked out this way because of the way that I was allowing the students to be a part of the learning process like they are supposed to be. I even told the class that they would get a break at some point in the lecture as well, and they would get to choose when to take that break. When I offered a break, they actually declined the first time and asked to continue! Altogether, these artifacts hopefully demonstrate how I seek to partner with students and colleagues in the learning process as a team.