How Have I Grown as a Teacher?

What I can say with certainty right now is that I understand much more about teaching profession. Winter quarter was an extremely intense time. A combination of main placement and coursework lessons plans, observations, integrated with main placement assignments, stretched us to the limit.

Feedback received from cooperating teacher, and faculty observer was very useful and was oriented toward areas needing improvement.Planning, instruction and assessment was focused on sequential lessons that balanced the teaching of literacy skills and strategies to support students to comprehend or write about text. It was a need for considering students' strengths and weaknesses and to select a main literacy focus and key language demand for the learning segment. Students' prior learning and experiences including their academic content knowledge, language development, social/emotional development, family/cultural assets, interests and lived experiences, had to be considered.

Requirements asked about instructing and engaging students in a teacher performance assessment format. We were asked to demonstrate how we work with students to provide opportunities to express their understanding of the learning targets and how you balance the teaching of skills and strategies so students develop their ability to comprehend text. I had to think about how my choices of instructional strategies engage students in learning skills and strategies to comprehend and/or compose text. Also, while teaching, I had to think how to prompt students to express their understanding of the learning targets and to make connections between their prior learning and experiences with the literacy skills and strategies to be learned.

Assessing student learning involved assessing student progress, analyzing student strengths, and use my analysis of student performance to improve instruction. I had to ask myself questions such as: How to use assessments and student-voice evidence to document and make sense of what students have learned? How do I provide feedback to students in a way that will enhance their learning? How do I need to use assessment evidence to plan next steps for my teaching?

Answering and thinking to these questions allowed me to develop and grow as a teacher. The most important thing is that I am starting to see what it takes to teach effectively.

Reference

Stanford University (2011). TPAC Elementary Literacy Assessment, WA Field Test Pre-Release Handbook.