Growth and Development

 

Professional Growth Goals

  1. Better, more consistent parent communication
  2. Helping students set work plans and work goals
  3. Improving instructional practices

Beginning of Year CSTP Survey Results

CSTP 2 Creating and Maintaining Effective Environments for Student Learning

CSTP 1 Engaging and Supporting All Students in Learning

CSTP 3 Understanding and Organizing Subject Matter for Student Learning

CSTP 6 Developing as a Professional Educator

CSTP 5 Assessing Students for Learning

CSTP 4 Planning Instruction and Designing Learning Experiences for All Students

End of Year CSTP Survey Results

CSTP 6 Developing as a Professional Educator

CSTP 2 Creating and Maintaining Effective Environments for Student Learning

CSTP 5 Assessing Students for Learning

CSTP 1 Engaging and Supporting All Students in Learning

CSTP 3 Understanding and Organizing Subject Matter for Student Learning

CSTP 4 Planning Instruction and Designing Learning Experiences for All Students

ILP 1 - Using Data to Ensure Educational Benefit

My school is heading towards improving our assessments and rubrics to better address student needs and skills that need to be mastered. We met as a middle school department to examine our data and find ways to adapt our lessons, assignments, and live instruction to target areas of need for our students. This direct focus on skills and providing opportunities to practice those skills is important for students. As a middle school Social Studies group, I and 3 other teachers looked at how we can improve the assignments in our 6-8 curriculum. One of the issues with our prewritten curriculum is that students are asked to do things with no lead-up, perform the task once, and then not asked to do it again. This clearly isn’t building the skills or confidence students need to complete these tasks with quality.

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ILP 2 - Leading Curricular Development for a team

I was tasked as a middle school lead to organize and direct a video creating push across all classes in our MS department. I set creating clear expectations for the teachers and supported them in the weeks we had to record these videos. I made instructions and guides for how to record and examples of what a video should look like. I met with each subject group to discuss their unique courses and where they thought videos will be best placed in their courses. We targeted the key ideas and assignments where students need support. We started to build a comprehensive library of videos that our students can access directly in their classes.

ILP 3 - Teacher Goal Setting and Reflection from a Coach's Perspective

As a newer teacher and coach, I had the benefit of meeting with multiple teachers to help them reflect and goal set for themselves. This was a great opportunity for me to observe and learn from other teachers. Something we don’t get to do so often. After meeting with a few teachers, I saw some immediate benefits from their experiences and potential changes for my own practices. It helped me reflect on practices I may want to change or implement myself. For example, a big takeaway I learned from a teacher is to frame homeroom group meetings as smaller pop-up type events. She was able to get decent attendance from her students and spread the content/lessons over 2 events. She said it seemed to improve interest and attendance over a standard homeroom group. I also had a more reflective meeting with another teacher highlighting the issues of having open office hours. Ultimately, the idea of goal setting and reflecting on goals with other teachers can be very helpful in refining practices. I think this would be a benefit to most teachers in a program to not only see good examples of effective teaching practice but to reflect on one’s own practice as well.

ILP 4 - Foundational Classroom Interventions and Supports

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working with multiple students on assignments or other work that they have skipped or have put off. I helped a number of students with assignments and provided outlines for more assignments and lists of work that students are missing from the curriculum. The students did really well with their work in our meetings. Having the outlines available made it easy for us to navigate the work in a content area I am not very familiar with. Working with the students also inspired some of them to attend my office hour or schedule an extra 1-1 meeting for more work time. Being proactive at the beginning of the year or semester would be helpful with this type of meeting. Setting an early expectation that students can come to me or another teacher for help will benefit them as they come across individual assignments. Hopefully, it helps them be more comfortable with asking questions about their work and less likely to skip a difficult or long assignment (or even easy ones).

Meeting My Goals

This year was full of surprises at my school both personally and in relation to my students. I was given new leadership opportunities that shifted the focus of my 2nd and 3rd inquiries to be more focused on supporting other teachers on top of my caseload of students. I think this contributed to my growth in CSTP 6 and possibly part of the reason for the decline of CSTP3 in my survey results. I am a little surprised at the shift based on the survey. This distracted me slightly from my growth goals set at the beginning of the year. In small ways I was able to work on my goals of student work plans and goal setting and improving the practices or curriculum in my courses. I do not feel like I made good progress on my first goal of improving parent communication, and it remains something for me to focus on to improve in the coming years.

Beginning this coming school year, I will be transitioning into HS at my school and taking on the role of college counselor. This is a need for my school as one of our counselors is taking on a more defined leadership role and they needed someone to step into her spot to help the remaining counselors. I have also been interested in supporting students in identifying their long term life goals and helping orient them to those self-made goals. The new role and challenge will allow me to do that.

Being a homeroom teacher and a counselor will require a team effort with the other teachers and support staff at my school. We often work together to overcome challenges or to reflect and address things that need change. We often construct plans for improvement in small groups so we can work together towards a common goal. This also helps me stay connected to the larger educational community as I look out for resources and training opportunities to improve my knowledge and skill in the various roles I take on.

My advice for new teachers is to be comfortable with change and making adjustments. This was a hard lesson learned by myself and even more experienced teachers this year given the pandemic and ever changing CA charter laws. Taking on new roles or even maintaining the one you’re in will necessarily come with change. Learning to be flexible and maintain a good attitude will benefit your mental health, joy at work, and ultimately your students success as well.