Quality Standard 4: Teachers demonstrate professionalism through ethical conduct, reflection, and leadership.
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Reflection:
I would rate myself as proficient in this standard. Throughout my stay at Lesher, I took on a variety of opportunities to extend myself into the professional environment. I did this by attending team meetings, observing and interviewing other teachers in the building, and by incorporating an extensive co-teaching model with my mentor teacher. Overall, I feel that I developed great professional connections and formed strong professional goals during my stay at Lesher. Moving forward, I would like to further refine and develop my professional goals, especially as I move towards grad school. How can my literary research and my work with college students inform how I develop my pedagogical practice? Beyond this, how can I work to develop PLC's and engage localities and communities in my scholarship? How can I motivate the people I work with to co-develop their goals and their projects? These are some of the questions which I plan to lead by as I continue to develop my proficiency as a professional.
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- Element a: Teachers demonstrate high standards for professional conduct.
- Artifact: Lesson Observation
- Reasoning Statement: Depicted are some of the comments from one of my mentor teacher's observations. This shows a small snippet of the kind of co-teaching element we developed, and my ability and desire as a professional to seek out the feedback of my colleagues, and respond to their presence in the classroom as well.
- Element b: Teachers link professional growth to their professional goals.
- Artifact: Meeting Agenda
- Reasoning Statement: Attached is the agenda of a 'staffulty' meeting I attended during my student teaching experience. Here, I engaged with the approach of Lesher Middle School, and had the chance to step into a moment of professional development with my colleagues. Meetings like these helped me orient myself within the school I was working, and how to localize my goals to the students who I was working with at the time. It is this approach which maintains a low-to-the-ground professional mode of development which I hope to continue to adopt.
- Element c: Teachers link professionalism through ethical conduct, reflection, and leadership.
- Artifact: Interview
- Reasoning Statement: Depicted is my reflection upon an interview I completed with another teacher in the building. This shows my commitment to reaching out into my professional network, and particularly my hopes to learn from other disciplines. A significant part of my learning process in relationship to other professionals is always critically placed within a mode of reflection, shown here, by which I was able to incorporate what I learned from that interview into my own thinking regarding my pedagogical practice.
- Element d: Teachers demonstrate leadership in the school, the community, and the teaching profession.
- Artifact: Wrestling Sign Up
- Reasoning Statement: Depicted is the sign-up sheet for help during the wrestling tournament season, of which I signed up several times to help run the scoreboard. By doing so, I was able to encounter students in a very different element and found that the relationships I developed with those students improved tremendously as a result. The small moment of engagement with the wrestling tournament configured me significantly more as a leader in the classroom, and is the exact kind of commitment to students and the school community at large which ultimately improves instruction in the classroom.
Reflection:
I would rate myself as proficient in this standard. Throughout my stay at Lesher, I took on a variety of opportunities to extend myself into the professional environment. I did this by attending team meetings, observing and interviewing other teachers in the building, and by incorporating an extensive co-teaching model with my mentor teacher. Overall, I feel that I developed great professional connections and formed strong professional goals during my stay at Lesher. Moving forward, I would like to further refine and develop my professional goals, especially as I move towards grad school. How can my literary research and my work with college students inform how I develop my pedagogical practice? Beyond this, how can I work to develop PLC's and engage localities and communities in my scholarship? How can I motivate the people I work with to co-develop their goals and their projects? These are some of the questions which I plan to lead by as I continue to develop my proficiency as a professional.
