STANDARD 8: COLLABORATIVE RELATIONSHIPS

Standard 8 - Collaborative Relationships – 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.

This artifact demonstrates Illinois Professional Teaching Standard 1 - Collaborative relationships

My cooperating teacher is such a wonderful resource. We are always working together to best develop our lessons and overall instructional plans. We work hand in hand to make sure we are coming up with the best ideas and best ways to teach the standards. I believe that co-planning with other teachers is the best way to make sure we are best serving our students. By working together, we can have more perspectives on the students and teaching. As a team, we can come up with more ideas and better techniques to teach the material and plan for all scenarios during the lesson.

I love to communicate and work with our building's classroom teachers. I believe communicating and working with other teachers, helps students to succeed. It is important for a teacher to collaborate with other teachers to make sure to have strong techniques to deliver instruction to each student and meet all students' needs.

Having a co-planning time with other teachers could be challenging. As a Bilingual/ EL teacher I understand that working and planning with the classroom teachers help my students learn better. We talk about our students' needs and plan accordingly. Sometimes we give some students extra support time when we progress monitoring them. During the co- Planning time, the classroom teachers share their concerns with our EL team and try to come up with a plan to better help our students.

This artifact demonstrates Illinois Professional Teaching Standard 1 - Collaborative relationships

These are flyers for BPAC meeting that I created and translated into two other languages so our EL parents do not have any language barriers. As an immigrant who came to a new country, I had challenges communicating with people around me because of the language. This artifact states that teachers should understand the benefits, barriers, and techniques involved in parent and family collaboration, so I translated this big event, the BPAC meeting flyers into Chinses and Arabic for my parents to help them involved in the school events and the community. Translating information papers for parents helps them feel welcomed. I also translated the meeting presentation into Arabic as most of my EL parents speak Arabic as their first language.

The BPAC meeting turned out to be a big success. Many parents came about 100 EL parents came to the meeting and we handed the presentation in Arabic. I also helped parents to communicate with their children's classroom teachers. Our EL parents came to school and met the teachers. Parents also got to know about the EL program in our school district and felt welcomed.

Flyers in different languages went to parents. Parents responded positively to the invitation. Parents were excited to meet the administrartors, classroom teacher, and EL teachers.