Professional portfolio part D PDF

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Professional Portfolio

Part D

Kaylan Bonnette

D. Create an individualized professional growth plan by doing the following: D1. Describe how you have developed as a teacher. D1a. Describe how professional development activities specific to content have contributed to your development. Every Tuesday, we had a grade level meeting to plan out when we would start teaching a new unit based on where we were with the current unit. The county gave out pacing guides that said how long each unit needed to be, but we still had to plan around events such as holidays and possible snow days. We knew that it would not be a good idea to introduce a new unit right before the Christmas break; we would have to introduce it again when they got back since they would have forgotten the information we introduced to them. We decided to extend the review for the previous unit an extra day and give the summative assessment the day before the break began. This contributed to my development by making me be more conscious of students’ mindset and working around a timeframe. D1b. Describe how professional activities specific to content pedagogy have contributed to your development. One of the courses I took with Western Governors University contributed to my development. That course was Elementary Visual and Performing Arts Methods. One of the tasks I was asked to do was to create lesson plans that incorporated the visual and performing arts into the four content areas (math, science, social studies, and English language arts). I did not think that it would be possible to do so and still teach the content area, but the course showed me that with a little creativity on my part, it is quite possible to do so while also inspiring creativity and critical thinking in students. D1c. Describe a specific example of how collaborating with a colleague has improved your teaching. I find it much easier to plan things in general, especially lesson plans, when I can talk with someone about it. Collaborating with colleagues, specifically my host teacher, helped me to plan my lessons. Without her ever having to say anything, I was able to get a start on improving my lessons. She did occasionally make suggestions where she felt it was necessary, but she generally let me plan the lessons. As I explained what I wanted to do for the lesson, she often already had something I would find useful during the lesson. It improved my teaching because I was able to better take into consideration the needs of the students; in this case, although I had learned many things about the students by the time I started teaching, she still knew more about the students in the class than I did, so collaborating with my host teacher allowed me to take their needs into account. D1d. Describe a specific example of how utilizing resources from professional education organizations has improved your teaching. Pinterest was very useful in getting ideas for visuals for teaching students about descriptive writing. There were several ideas for introducing the topic. The one I used briefly described the purpose of descriptive writing and some things to remember about it, including some nonexamples. It also included a T-chart. One side was for “telling” sentences, which were not very descriptive. The other side was for a “showing” version of the same sentence, which were detailed and descriptive (Lynne, n.d.). I read a book to them when I introduced the topic that contained plenty of descriptive text and I used examples from the book. One of the examples I used was “The bed quivered as Gabe’s stomach rumbled with hunger” (Noll, 2009), which was the “showing” sentence. The “telling” sentence would have simply been “Gabe was hungry”. The chart remained where students could easily refer back to it. Using this resource improved my

Professional Portfolio

Part D

Kaylan Bonnette

teaching because I was able to use it as a tool in conjunction with my pre-written lesson plan to help guide my lesson. D2. Describe a specific goal for how you want to improve as a teacher. I would like to become more confident in myself as a teacher. D2a. Discuss how you will accomplish the goal described in part D2. The only way I can accomplish this goal is to be in the classroom; the more I teach, the more confident I will become. The biggest obstacle in being a better teacher for me is my confidence level. If I am more confident, I will be able to be a better teacher....