From the beginning of the course I was a novice teacher with some leadership skills. I led a Geometry Professional Learning Community (PLC), collaborated heavily with others in my math department over baseline exams, awards, etc. However, I felt that I lacked the full traits of being considered “a leader”. Over the course of the quarter I will admit I was a bit scared going into this program due to a possibly extreme learning curve especially not being in the University Place School District (UPSD). I was thankfully surprised over the support I received over the time by the class facilitator, Angie Franklin, and the rest of the classmates. Based off of the standards I learned from Seattle Pacific University’s School of Education I felt I gained the most in:
Standard 2: Analyze learning to promote student growth.
Standard 4: Engage in analysis of teaching and collaborative practices.
With my district’s Danielson Framework of TPEP I found that I did use most of what I was taught in my classroom already. The standards included were:
1e: Designing Coherent Instructions
4a: Reflecting on Teaching
4d Participating in the Professional Community
4e Growing and Developing Professionally
During the course of the quarter I found that an accomplished teacher always reflects on their practices. They are ones that look back at their lessons, see how well it went, and how to alter their plans for the future. In this class I found that the reflective strategies have helped. Brookhart, S. M. (2016) pointed out that lessons that support higher-order learning are also likely to interest and engage students. So I focused my time reflecting on how I could structure my lessons to interest the students. During the first meeting with the rest of the UPSD cohort I found the coaching session to be quite useful. Working with Pat Perkins during the coaching session, I wanted him to focus the time on methods to engage my students and an area in which I struggled was questioning and discussion techniques. Hintz, A., Kazemi, E. (2014) pointed out that the goal of questioning and discussion techniques are what the teacher can listen for, ideas to pursue, and which to highlight in the lesson. His years of expertise helped shape my lesson on lesson 3.2, different types of angle pairs to promote discussion as well as making it relevant to students. While forming the lesson plan for me to teach, his knowledge of English pushed me to influence more vocabulary by incorporating different strategies into the lessons to benefit my students learning geometry.
After taking what my coaching partner told me I taught my lesson to my students. The overall lesson went well, but I knew I could have done better. Before showing it to the cohort, I wrote down different ways I could have improved the lesson so the class could tell me if that component would have been a better choice During the second cohort session I was placed with Conrado Julian, Vanessa Oh, and Cleo Hagen. We reviewed each other’s lessons and gave critiques. I was glad to have teachers who did not know me too well to examine my lesson and give me critiques with less of a bias. The overall experience was useful as they gave more ideas on how to alter my lessons to engage more students and more questioning techniques. York-Barr et a. (2006) found that in groups, more resources are available and the participants gain significant improvements with their colleagues.
From this class I can now consider myself a more accomplished teacher and closer to my goal of being a leader. As I continue my future lesson planning I will make sure to influence more lessons that will engage students. For example, at the end of this unit that I am teaching on Transformations, my Geometry PLC and I will be giving the students a project I designed, “Transformations Logo Project” as a way to demonstrate to my students how geometry is used in everyday life in a creative way. I will also keep pushing myself to look for more questioning and discussion techniques for my lessons. As I continue to pursue my goals I will continuously look back on this class as it has been beneficial to how I reflect on my instructional practices.
Artifacts Listed in Reflection
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Cohort Members in Reflection
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Works Cited
Brookhart, S. M. (2016). Start With Higher-Order Thinking. Educational Leadership, 74(2), 10-15.
Hintz, A., Kazemi, E. (2014). Intentional Talk: How to Structure and Lead Productive Mathematical Discussions. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.
The Danielson Group. (2013). The Framework for Teaching Evaluation Instrument 2013 Edition. Princeton, NJ: Danielson, C.
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