Teachers will work with other teachers, parents, students, and other members of the community to build a learning environment where students can grow and succeed.
Goal:
I will attend all professional development trainings, staff meetings, and PLCs and be an active and engaged member of the math department and staff at Tooele High School.
Goal Reflection:
I want to be the kind of student I expect my own students to be. I want my students to do homework so we can have productive conversations, so it's only fair that I read the assigned materials so I can participate in faculty discussions during PLC and faculty meeting. I expect my students to attend class and be focused so they can learn, so I have the same expectations of myself when I attend professional development. I attended every faculty meeting, professional development, PLC, and was an active participant in every data meeting that was held this year. I don't want to just be a teacher, I want to be an adult professional.
Evidence:
In February, during our professional development day, the math department outlined a plan to implement reciprocal teaching.
Reflection:
Unfortunately, I have witnessed many non-examples of effective teamwork and collaboration in my two years of teaching. Thankfully, non-examples are oftentimes an effective way to teach what not to do and inspire greatness in those who recognize them as non-examples. Seeing teachers who are unengaged in PLCs, distracted in faculty meetings, and not participating in data meetings has strengthened my resolve to be an active member of my PLCs and professional developments.
I attended all of the professional development opportunities in which we were trained on Reciprocal Teaching, but I still struggled with ways to implement this strategy in a math classroom. In the February Professional Development meeting I realized I wasn't alone in this feeling, and the entire math department was a little unsure of what to do. We established the plan you see above that gave step-by-step instructions to the math teachers so we could implement Reciprocal Teaching in baby steps. As I have been taking these baby steps to implement Reciprocal Teaching, I have been observing other math teachers as they implement Reciprocal Teaching. When I observe, I look for specific strategies, and then I share my findings with the other teacher after the lesson. The other teachers who have observed me have offered me this same courtesy, and our findings are usually quite similar. We are often unaware that we are already implementing these strategies, and usually our only advice to one another is to recognize and explicitly state the strategy when it is being used! This has been such a wonderful epiphany for us all, and one we never would have been able to arrive at had we not been executing our observations as outlined in our plan.
I attended all of the professional development opportunities in which we were trained on Reciprocal Teaching, but I still struggled with ways to implement this strategy in a math classroom. In the February Professional Development meeting I realized I wasn't alone in this feeling, and the entire math department was a little unsure of what to do. We established the plan you see above that gave step-by-step instructions to the math teachers so we could implement Reciprocal Teaching in baby steps. As I have been taking these baby steps to implement Reciprocal Teaching, I have been observing other math teachers as they implement Reciprocal Teaching. When I observe, I look for specific strategies, and then I share my findings with the other teacher after the lesson. The other teachers who have observed me have offered me this same courtesy, and our findings are usually quite similar. We are often unaware that we are already implementing these strategies, and usually our only advice to one another is to recognize and explicitly state the strategy when it is being used! This has been such a wonderful epiphany for us all, and one we never would have been able to arrive at had we not been executing our observations as outlined in our plan.