STANDARD 4: LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

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.

This artifact demonstrates Illinois Professional Teaching Standard 4 - Learning environment

I work with EL students in mall groups of instruction. When we first started, I shared with all of my students the class rules and the expectations that students need to follow when they come to my classroom and work together. I made the rules very clear to all my students. We also played a game sharing the class rules and providing examples about each rule. Students also got to work with a partner choosing one of the class rules and talking about it.

We review our class rules when students need a reminder or a correction to a specific behavior. This applies to standard four as it states that teachers should create expectations and procedures for communication and behavior and a physical setting conducive to achieving classroom goals.

One of the expectations that I have in place for my students is that when they come to the room, they sit on the carpet and they need to make sure that they stay in their bubble and not touch anyone around them. Having this physical awareness help students learn boundaries and follow directions.

This artifact demonstrates Illinois Professional Teaching Standard 4 - Learning environment

In this lesson, I was working with small groups of EL first-grade students. I was teaching and modeling to students how to work with a partner and how to share their work. In this lesson, we were talking about nouns. I introduced what is a noun, we used many activities to teach what a noun is. Students used pictures and visuals to identify nouns. Then we started to work on completing sentence frames using different nouns. Students were encouraged to work with a partner to complete the sentence frame using the appropriate noun that matches the sentence. Students have noun cards with pictures to help them navigate the activity easily and feel comfortable working and sharing with partners.

First, I modeled to students what it looks like to work with a partner and share their work. Students were able to successfully work with their partners and this applies to standard 4 which states the teacher understands how to help students work cooperatively in groups. Working with a partner helps all my students have self-confidence and they all have the opportunity to talk and share without having any fears of making mistakes.