Aubree Clark's Portfilio

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...

Standard 1 of Seattle Pacific University's Standards for Teacher Leadership states that teacher leaders “model ethical and moral behavior”.  The class EDU 6085 was one class that focused specifically on this standard.   Below is a reflection from reading “The Charged Classroom” by Judith Pace that demonstrates my understanding related to this standard.    When considering “The Charged Classroom”, Judith Pace is primarily referring to the many challenges that both teachers and students face when encountering differences or potentially uncomfortable conversations within the classroom.  Many factors can contribute to a “charged” classroom, such as academic rigor and pressures that both teachers and students face, opportunities for discussion around conflicting viewpoints, or communicating academic standards and results.  While Pace highlights the many difficulties that can accompany a “charged” classroom, it is evident that such is unavoidable and can c...

Standard 12 for Seattle Pacific University's Teacher Leadership Standards states that teacher leaders "evaluate and use technology for teaching and learning".  The class EDTC 6433, Teaching with Technology, was a great learning tool to move forward in this standard.  Technology is something that has been a passion of mine since before becoming a teacher.  It seemed so natural to me to integrate technology into my classroom practices in order to get the most out of instructional times.  Where this class helped me the most, however, is thinking about leveraging technology for our entire school building, our communities, and in working with teachers who aren't as comfortable with technology.  While I think the entire "Teaching with Technology" blog page demonstrates various aspects of this standard ( linked here ), I think both reflection #3 and reflection #5 highlight key understandings from the course related to the standard.  These two subjects, digital...

S eattle Pacific University's Standards for Teacher Leadership states that teacher leaders " establish a culturally inclusive learning climate that facilitates academic engagement and success for all students ."(Standard 5, SPU).  The course "EDU 6525, Culturally Responsive Teaching" enhanced my learning in this area, along with my district's professional development focus of cultural competency.  Below is a reflection that demonstrates some of my learning for this standard:  EDU 6525 has been powerful in learning how culture can impact our daily lives, specifically in education.    While I have been on a personal journey in digging deeper into cultural competency and understanding hidden biases and privileges I may have, it has been eye opening to see the implications it can have for my students and my profession as an educator.   As I ponder over the major takeaways of this course, the things that stick with me the most are aspects of multicultural e...

Seattle Pacific University's Standards for Teacher Leadership Standard 7 states that teacher leaders "utilize instructional frameworks for teaching to improve practice".  This work has been a central theme both in our teacher leadership classes and in my own work in becoming a stronger teacher.  We have looked at our own district's instructional frameworks such as the Danielson Framework and the "State 8" (OSPI, 2018).  We have also used many texts to learn about and work with instructional frameworks within the classroom such as instructional strategies (Hattie, 2012).  Finally, we have gained experience with frameworks for coaching other teachers, such as instructional coaching models and paraphrasing/coaching frames (Knight, 2018). One of the first classes that we took, Accomplished Teaching, allowed us to look at our district's instructional framework to goal set and improve our practice.  Linked here is my reflection from that work.  When learnin...

Seattle Pacific University's Standards for Teacher Leadership Standard 6 states that teacher leaders "communicate and collaborate with a variety of stakeholders".  Both within the classes "Communication and Collaboration" (EDU 6600) and in "Engaging Communities" (EDAD 6589) I realized the huge impact that partnering with involved parties can have on a school building.  Prior to my teacher leadership program work I felt as though I was very narrowed in on things that I felt directly related to my students and I: my student's families engagement with curriculum, communicating academics to parents, providing updates, etc.  It wasn't until I looked more broadly at the entire school community that I realize the more involved I am as a teacher and the more community outreach we do as a building, the more successful our students can be.   One artifact that demonstrates my learning process when engaging with communities is my Community Engagement ...

Standard Two of Seattle Pacific University's Standards for Teacher Leadership states that teacher leaders "analyze learning to promote student growth".  While I believe this standard was woven throughout all of our courses in the teacher leadership program, I was able to demonstrate using the most through my action research project.  Linked here is my action research reflection, that discusses what I did for my research project and why I selected that action research topic.  It also includes some sample student work in which I analyzed to move forward with student growth.  The part of my action research project that I feel highlights the analyzing of student learning the most was the data collection process.  Linked is an outline that I used for my action research project.  This holds the information of how much dialogue was able to take place using accountable talk sentence stems by my first graders with and without my interjecting.  This, along w...

Standard 10 for Seattle Pacific University's Standards For Teacher Leadership states that teacher leaders "understand effective use of research based instructional practices."  The course "survey of instructional strategies was perfect for deepening my skills and understanding in this area.  When reflecting during this course, I often would say that while I was using many of these strategies regularly, I now had the skills to help support others with them because I had the foundation of common language and research based reasons about why they are effective.   This course looked into various instructional strategies, many of which we demonstrated through planning or teaching lessons using these skills.  I have chosen some of the instructional strategies that were learned to demonstrate my understanding in this standard:  The first instructional strategy that we demonstrated was involving students in the lesson's learning target and connecting it to previ...

Standard 9 The Seattle Pacific University Standards for Teacher Leadership Standard 9 states teacher leaders “ evaluate and use effective curriculum design ”.  Throughout my experiences both in my teaching position and through pieces of the courses I have taken in this program, I have had opportunities to practice evaluating and using effective curriculum design.  Within the course “survey of instructional strategies”, we were provided with many opportunities to practice and teach research based strategies that can then be used as guidelines within curriculum development and design.  Through my teaching position, I have also been given opportunities to sharpen my skills in this area such as designing a curriculum map for my team and being a part of a STEM curriculum adoption committee. Prior to entering the teacher leadership program, I did feel competent in creating and evaluating effective curriculum design.  When I started my first teaching job in Washingt...

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 ...