Characterisitics

"We believe the novice teacher should be a facilitator of learning for all students. "

To me, Characteristic 4, means being aware of the students' abilities, needs, and interests and planning lessons around those characteristics.It means using a variety of teaching strategies to meet every learning style, using engaging lessons that are motivating and fun for the students, and differentiating instruction to meet the varying levels of ability, so all students are given the equal opportunity to learn and benefit from a lesson.

An artifact that I can use for this characteristic, is a lesson plan that I developed for SPED 360 that I taught in a first grade classroom last semester. This lesson plan is differentiated by student's reading ability, and the lesson focuses on making/writing text to self connections which met CSO RLA.0.1.1.15: make text-to-self connections. This lesson was taught in whole and small groups. The whole group portion included me reading the story and facilitating a discussion on making connections. The lesson plan shows the varying strategies I used for this portion which is important to use while facilitating learning for all. The small group portion was taught during their daily stations. Students completed this part of the lesson during the "writing station". In which I differentiated the product by readiness. I had the low ability group, make 1 connection to either character, setting, or event and draw their connection and orally dictate their connections. I had the low/middle group draw pictures with captions to illustrate their 1 connection. I had the middle/high group write complete sentences to make a connection to 2 of the following: characters, settings, or events. I then had the high group make 3 connections and write them in complete sentences.

This lesson plan shows how I facilitated learning for all by using a variety of teaching, learning, and management strategies (which are detailed in the lesson plan) and by differentiating the instruction (which is also detailed in depth).

"We believe that the novice teacher should be a reflective practitioner."

To me, characteristic 8, means that as a teacher I am an active and deliberate reflective practitioner. It means that I reflect on my teaching, my lessons, and all decisions made throughout the day. It is more than just purely reflecting, it is an active reflection process, in which I am reflecting for a purpose - and make changes or modifications based on those reflections. 

For this characteristic, I could use my inquiry project from last semester as my artifact. For that assignment, I used my teacher journal, in which I observe and reflect on a weekly basis to narrow my inquiry focus on context. I reflected on my observations and wonderings found my in my journal and decided to look into how differentiation can affect student's motivation and behavior. I then, tried differentiating the instruction to further investigate this wondering (lesson plan that I talked about above). I reflected on my pre-differentiation observations and my post-differentation observations and I found there was an increase in student's motivation and positive behavior.

I feel this artifact shows that I am an active reflective practitioner. I used my reflection process on my daily observations, to find something that could possibly be changed, changed it, and then reflected again on the outcomes of that change - from this inquiry project I have learned the value in differentiating and continue to differentiate lessons as a result of my reflective practice. This artifact also encompasses my teacher journal that is very reflective in nature and a lesson plan that shows my detailed reflection after teaching. For those reasons, I feel this artifact is the most encompassing to show how I am reflective across many aspects in my pre-service teaching.