Skip to main content

Standard 8 Reflection


Seattle Pacific University’s Standards for Teacher Leadership Standard 8 states that teacher leaders “present professional practice for the review of colleagues.”  This standards summarized the entire experience of our teacher leadership program.  We have been given opportunities to reflect on our teaching through recording various teaching strategies and seek feedback from colleagues, practice coaching techniques, and also get feedback from various research, papers, and presentations around a specific educational topic.  
At the beginning of the course, you can read about my initial reflection here.  This is where I engaged in self-reflection to identify the areas of focus I had for this program in regards to my district’s instructional framework, Danielson.  Since this course, I have had many opportunities to expand my knowledge in my self-selected area, Domain 3, along with all Danielson domains.  Survey of Instructional Strategies is the course that I got the most practice with this in, as well as got the most feedback from colleagues.  Below are links to teaching videos that reflect various teaching strategies within Domain 3. 
Linked here is my Standard 10 reflection, which highlights instructional videos, lesson plans, and coaching documents for specific instructional strategies.  All of these strategies are research based and come from Marzano’s work (Marzano, et. al, 2005). 
Even since the instructional strategies course, my skills in this area have grown due to continued reflection resources, continued access to educational research, and exposure to various leadership opportunities.  I have been able to use what I’ve gained from this course and apply it to mentorship opportunities within my building, taking specifically what I’ve worked on within Domain 3 and using that to guide newer teachers.  I look forward to continuing to develop these skills as similar opportunities arise.  One new opportunity that working on leadership skills has brought is presenting a professional development session around differentiation in math at our district-wide August PD.  I re-read my initial reflection that discussed my difficulties around differentiating without doubling the workload, and then read the course description of of the math differentiation PD, offering solutions and a brainstorming workshop to what seems like the same struggles I had two years prior.  It wasn’t until doing this that I realized just how far I had come in my learning, primarily thanks to this program. 
Another important resource that I’ve been able to take with me whenever challenges arise or I realize I need to reflect on my current practice regarding something specific is Hattie’s “Mindframes for Visible Learning” (Hattie, 2012).  Below is a picture that I have posted on my computer as a reminder to myself, which has proven valuable in many situations.  Through these 8 mindframes, I have been able to ask important questions at team meetings that have helped start to shift our thinking with some practices such as devoting specific time to review student work each meeting (#1 and #3).  I have also re-considered how I used assessment in my classroom, shifting around formative assessment to make sure it is only ever used to inform my instruction or give students a space for goal setting.  When considering the last one, “use, share, and teach language of learning”, it makes me think of the need our building had for use of common language in literacy.  Since our SIP was focused around literacy and many of our students receive interventions from specialists, I heard many complaints that our building needed to use common language in literacy instruction so that the specialists didn’t have to adapt to each classroom.  A “common language committee” stemmed from this, where a subgroup of teachers could work on our “language of learning” and collaborate in order to come up with best practice for students.
Overall, the 12 Standards for Teacher Leadership and the Teacher Leadership classes themselves have helped me grow immensely both in my pedagogy and with my leadership skills.  I think the biggest takeaway from this experiences is the importance of reflection as an educator.  While there will never be a program or experience that can fully prepare you for what is ahead in our ever-changing world of education, the sharpening of teaching and coaching strategies, knowledge of where to find important resources, and the formation of a reflective professional learning community have set the stage for a successful future.  Using what I have learned from these 12 standards, I plan on practicing continuous reflection on myself to continue to improve my teaching and leadership skills while remaining in the classroom.  I would love to then transfer some of that work over to a different teacher leadership position where I could reach more teachers and students. 

Resources:
Hattie, John. Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning.(2012). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

Marzano, Robert J., Pickering, Debra J. & Pollock, Jane E. (2005). Classroom Instruction that Works, Research-based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, Inc.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Standard 11 Reflection

Standard 11- Formative and Summative Assessment Standard 11 in Teacher Leadership standards for Seattle Pacific University states one must be able to “ utilize formative and summative assessment in a standards based environment .” As my skills in other teacher leadership standards have increased, this one naturally did as well.  While I used to shy away from the word “assessment” all together, I have realized that I cannot be a skilled and effective teacher without it.  I also realized how much I used formative assessments throughout my lessons without explicitly planning it. Throughout my experience in the Teacher Leadership program, my skills in both implementing specific formative assessment and choosing appropriate summative assessments have increased. At the very beginning of our program, we spent some time looking through our districts evaluation criteria, mine being the Danielson Framework.  We identified areas of strength and areas we want to work on throug
Post a Comment
Read more

Reflection on Teaching and Learning

Teacher Leadership Standard 3 The third Teacher Leadership standard states " Teacher leaders improve teaching and learning through the use of educational research a the classroom and school levels" ( Seattle Pacific University-Teacher Leadership Program Standards).  While various classes within SPU's teacher leadership program facilitated opportunities to improve teaching and learning practices, completing an action research project and sharing my findings with administration was a learning experience that best highlighted this standard.  Throughout my reflection you will notice that I was able to take charge of my own learning and growth within my classroom, and then share my findings with others.  Going through the practice of identifying areas of growth, doing my own educational research, and then implementing a plan of action within my classroom was an empowering experience as an educator and helped sharpen my skills as a teacher leader in order to facilitate actio
Post a Comment
Read more

EDTC 6433 Module 3 Reflection

Modeling Digital Citizenship to Young Learners The question I set out to answer for Module 3 was “How can I model effective use of technology to encourage students to be digital citizens?”.  I chose this question based off of the ISTE Standard 3: Model Digital Age Work and Learning.  I wanted to focus primarily on the “modeling” aspect of this ISTE standard, because it is so important that effective use of technology is modeled to students from an early age.  Since I teach first grade, I model everything I do.  It only makes sense to model effective use of technology right along with my students, even when I am not specifically teaching a lesson related to technology.  If I am modeling the correct ways to use technology, my students are more likely to use it the correct way as well when they get an opportunity to use it.  When reviewing the Module 3 assigned readings, I came across the article “The Difference between Digital Literacy and Digital Fluency”.  This article expre
2 comments
Read more