Professionalism (TPE 6) 

  As a young teacher, speaking and dressing professionally has made a big impact in how I am treated and how much I am respected at my site. My cooperating teacher has said, "I have been impressed with her receptiveness to feeback and her ability to apply the feedback in her future lessons." One of my favorite parts of this semester has been debriefing with my CT after I have taught a lesson. I am well aware that there is a lot of of area to continue growing and there is much learning to be done as a new teacher. Therefore, when I am given suggestions, I reflect on them and try incorporating the suggestions into my next lesson. 

Since I am teaching lessons for the first time, I don't always have a sense of how the lesson will go with my students or the best way to teach the lesson. An example is when I taught a math lesson on division strategies. For the welcome activity students were given a set of cards to sort into categories based on what pairs noticed. The card sort was supposed to help students break down the original expression using the distributive property to make solving the division problem more easily. As I reflect on this lesson, I realized there was so many adjustments that could have been made in order for the activity to run more smoothly such as: modeling how I would do categorize the numbers first, pre-cutting the cards for students, or completing this as a whole class. This lesson helped me learn more about my students needs and helped me adjust my instruction for the rest of the semester by modeling more for my students through an I do, we do, you do strategy (TPE 6.1)

I noticed myself growing as a professional through every Professional Learning Community I attended this semester. At first I was slightly overwhelmed with all the information and testing vocabulary being thrown around. After each meeting I would talk to my CT about any questions I had from that meeting. As time went on, I began participating more to the discussion as we brain stormed ideas to support our students as we get closer to taking the end of year CAASPP assessment or teaching academic vocabulary to our students. During our summary writing, I led a discussion about the structure I was using in my power hour groups to help student develop their summary writing. Many times we would share where we were at in Math lessons or Wit and Wisdom and how we could continue modifying instruction to support our diverse student needs (TPE 6.3). 

I was enthusiastic about parent conferences because I was able to speak to parents about the lessons I have been teaching and the ways that I support their child in the classroom. Based on some inappropriate behaviors we were seeing in the classroom, my CT and I decided it was time to discuss these students and their behaviors with parents at conferences as well. This was so helpful because from that moment on we no longer had to remind students about shouting out foul language. This was a small incident that showed me the importance of creating professional relationships with parents and family members through face-to-face or Parent Square communication (TPE 6.4).