Content Knowledge
Human Development and Learning
Diversity
Planning for Instruction
Learning Environment
Instructional Delivery
Communication
Assessment
Collaborative Relationships
Reflection and Professional Growth
Professional Conduct
Content Knowledge
The teacher understands the central concepts, methods of inquiry, and structures of the discipline(s) and creates learning experiences that make content meaningful to all students.
Having knowledge of the content that needs to be taught in a classroom requires accessibility to different resources. A teacher needs to be able to provide resources for the students to use and also resources that will familiarize them with a challenging topic. Using different ways of teaching one subject also keeps the students interested and engaged in the topic. Integrating the topic into different subject areas also provides consistency and saturation of the content. This is a picture of my students participating in a jigsaw on the planets in our solar system.
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Human Development and Learning
The teacher understands how individuals grow, develop, and learn and provides learning opportunities that support the intellectual, social and personal development of all learners.
As a teacher I know how important it is to truly understand my students. I was faced with the challenge of providing new learning opportunities each day for a group of active learners. I was able to incorporate the use of math workstations in to my classroom. This provided my students with opportunities to move around the room and explore different ways of learning various math concepts.
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Diversity
The teacher understands how students differ in their approaches to learning and creates instructional opportunities that are adapted to diverse learners.
Every classroom contains different learners and no two classrooms are the same. This means that every teacher should be developing adaptable learning goals and activities for their students. Knowing the way each student learns best is a great way to create these activities. After getting to know student needs and figuring out what will work best for the class as a whole, the teacher can plan lessons accordingly. A great way to reach students is to switch up teaching styles and provide lessons that reach different interests and cultures. This is a picture of my students participating in a reader's theater during our guided reading groups.
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Planning for Instruction
The teacher understands instructional planning and designs instruction based upon knowledge of the discipline, students, community, and curriculum goals.
Thoroughly planning lessons may take a lot of time, but the benefit of making sure that each lesson leads students toward their goals is truly worth that effort. Making sure that each lesson aligns with standards and student goals is essential to getting each student to be where they should each year. Providing them with engaging and beneficial activities keeps them challenged and excited. A great way to do this is to again, know the students and what interests them. I have been given an energetic and question-filled group of students who always want to know more about topics I teach them. This gives plenty of options for teaching styles, methods and lesson ideas. This is a picture of my students working on a summative assessment for our unit on the Solar System.
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Learning Environment
The teacher uses an understanding of individual and group motivation and behavior to create a learning environment that encourages positive social interaction, active engagement in learning, and self-motivation.
Teachers must also know how to keep those routines consistent and know the difference between procedures and rules. By creating a consistency using procedures, routines, and a short list of rules students will grow and learn in a warm and nurturing environment. A classroom that has a constant routine is conducive to learning because student are then just able to focus on what they are learning instead of knowing or not knowing what is going to be happening in school each day. It allows students to be completely engaged in what they are learning. This is a picture of one of my students doing her morning work. The students had to count up the money on the board and hand in a slip with their name and correct amount on it. We then graphed the number of correct answers. This motivated the students because they really wanted to graph all the way to the top each day and it caused them to work really hard on counting correctly.
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Instructional Delivery
The teacher understands and uses a variety of instructional strategies to encourage students' development of critical thinking, problem solving, and performance skills.
I have to say that I really enjoyed coming up with new instructional methods from week to week. It challenged my creativity and kept the students engaged and excited. My spelling lessons were a great way to be creative and try new things. During our unit on contractions I created a game where the students had to pick a word part out of a basket and then find their word partner. For instance one student would pick "should" and one would pick "n't". I would then quiz them on what words were used in the contraction and have them use it in a sentence. This is a picture of my students participating in that activity.
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Communication
The teacher uses knowledge of effective written, verbal, nonverbal, and visual communication techniques to foster active inquiry, collaboration, and supportive interaction in the classroom.
In our first semester of this year the interns were required to hold a teach-in for fifth grade classes. This was an opportunity to work in a group of 8 and create mini-units in the form of stations. The fifth graders would come down to our PDS classroom and participate in stations about different topics. This assignment required a lot of communication between group members and teachers. We used email, phone calls and meetings to put everything together for our teach-ins. One other group of our peers was required to be at the teach-in and provide feedback on how the lessons went too. All of the teach-ins were a success and promoted engaged and active learning among the students. This is a picture of me and one of my peers in front of our station during our teach-in on the revolutionary war. We talked with the students about the differences and similarities between George Washington and King George III.
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Assessment
The teacher understands various formal and informal assessment strategies and uses them to support the continuous development of all students.
Using more than one method of assessment truly provides a more rounded picture of a student’s progress. Some students are better at certain types of assessment than others. There are so many ways to find out what students know that it would almost seem wasteful not to use as many of those ways as possible. Teachers have the option of using informal and formal assessments with students. They should also be assessing student progress along the way as well as at the end of a unit. This is a picture of two student participating in a class store during our unit on money. The earned fake coins as part of a behavior plan and then were able to spend it at the store. They had to count up the money and figure out what they could afford.
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Collaborative Relationships
The teacher understands the role of the community in education and develops and maintains collaborative relationships with colleagues, parents/guardians, and the community to support student learning and well-being.
An important part of any job is knowing how to work with others. I have had incredible opportunities to collaborate with teachers and fellow pre-service teachers during my time as a PDS intern. Throughout my student teaching experiences I have attended the start of the year workshops, school improvement meetings, school leadership meetings, and courses during my clinical experiences. As a teacher, collaboration is extremely important in order to get ideas and advice. Teaching the children of our diverse society becomes more challenging each day and I know that we can use all the help we can get. This is a picture of me and my peers participating in a debriefing.
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Reflection and Professional Growth
The teacher is a reflective practitioner who continually evaluates how choices and actions affect students, parents, and other professionals in the learning community and actively seeks opportunities to grow professionally.
Being a teacher requires constant enhancement of what one knows. This can be done in many different ways. Attending professional conferences, collaborating with other interns and teachers, and attending school improvement days are great ways to further what I need to know as a teacher. As an intern, I have also seen how important it will be for me to pursue further education to gain knowledge in other content areas. This is important because it will better equip me to teach future groups of students. Classrooms and the generations of children are constantly changing. Above is a picture of me and some of my peers participating as appraisers for Destination Imagination. This was a great opportunity to be involved with an event that allows students to really show off their creativity. It was also a great way to meet other teachers and students in the district.
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Professional Conduct
The teacher understands education as a profession, maintains standards of professional conduct, and provides leadership to improve student learning and well-being.
A teacher needs to know what they believe about education. I feel that having a strong philosophy of teaching involves knowing how children think, how they learn and what works best for different students. It’s also about being flexible and open to trying new things. Teachers should be reading current research, observing their class, and then making judgments of how they can better reach their group of students. Another great way of showing professionalism and enthusiasm for learning is to participate in student events. I attended the Young Authors Awards Night to support two of my students who had won.
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