Leadership and Collaboration
Teachers are leaders for the students they teach and throughout their community. Because I am getting my degree in education does not mean that I will only be responsible for teaching within my classroom. Teachers must be protectors of knowledge and guides to all of our students, urging them to strive to reach the stars. I have had several opportunities to work with others, in my program and with middle school students, that have given me insight into what it means to be an educator. Educators must be effective both inside and out of the classroom.
School Improvement Plan Project
For this project I worked with a group of other "teachers-in-training" to create a school improvement plan (SIP). We chose to focus on the issue of Teacher Retention. Our group was to role play as if we were a SIP committee. We designed a school, what the culture of our school would be. Then we all worked together to do research on the statistics. We created a spread sheet of the statistics found and created a collaborative research paper. The paper also included interviews from two teachers, a parent and an administrator. Last, we had to come up with possible solutions for our issue, so there are several ideas to help curb teacher attrition. Examples are faculty retreats, mentor programs and opportunities for advancement and prestige.
This was a great assignment because it gave us a real look at real situations and a real problem in the field that we would soon be entering. For me, it also caused me to look hard at becoming an educator. I could see that this job is challenging, and the challenge wasn't in the classroom, it was all the politics and administrative aspects of the job. I saw that many people were leaving the field because of low pay and unfavorable work conditions. I had to make a decision. Was this something that I was willing to face throughout my career? It definitely caused some introspection on my part. I decided that I was willing to work around this because of the excitement that I felt about teaching and the internal reward I got from the idea for helping people learn. This feeling was confirmed when I began my student teaching, maybe I will change later in my career but for now I am really looking forward to becoming a teacher.
This was a great assignment because it gave us a real look at real situations and a real problem in the field that we would soon be entering. For me, it also caused me to look hard at becoming an educator. I could see that this job is challenging, and the challenge wasn't in the classroom, it was all the politics and administrative aspects of the job. I saw that many people were leaving the field because of low pay and unfavorable work conditions. I had to make a decision. Was this something that I was willing to face throughout my career? It definitely caused some introspection on my part. I decided that I was willing to work around this because of the excitement that I felt about teaching and the internal reward I got from the idea for helping people learn. This feeling was confirmed when I began my student teaching, maybe I will change later in my career but for now I am really looking forward to becoming a teacher.
SIP Plan PresentationHere is a short power point presentation giving an overview for the plan.
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Statistic Spread SheetThe numbers behind the research.
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Complete Research PaperThis is the complete research paper.
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Collaboration with Students at the Friday Institute
TOP 2011 and TOP 2012
I had the opportunity to work with students at the Centennial Campus Magnet Middle School three separate times. I had the privileged of participating in The Outsiders Project twice. Each time was in a different capacity, the first I was there to observe and learn to recognize different developmental signals based on research from experts in Adolescent Psychology such as Bloom, Erickson, Charity James, Maslow and Piaget. The second time I was there observing adolescent interaction with literature. In this program we discuss the literary devices of the book and compare them to the similar devices in the music, finishing with a music video created in our groups with our student partners.
In 2011, I worked with a student who had recently move here from Malaysia. She spoke English very well for only having lived here for two years, but you could definitely tell she was an English Language Learner. She was up-beat and excited to work with me to create the music video. She was a little shy at first but boy when we got into the swing of things she really took off! When the time came to record the music video she came in costume and even greased her hair back because she was playing the main Greaser "Johnny." In the class I was at the time I was looking for examples of adolescent development stages. I worked with my whole class to pin point actions and reaction of students in the program and identify way they might act that way based on the research.
In 2012, I had the honor of working with TWO great girls! They were friends and really fun to work
In 2011, I worked with a student who had recently move here from Malaysia. She spoke English very well for only having lived here for two years, but you could definitely tell she was an English Language Learner. She was up-beat and excited to work with me to create the music video. She was a little shy at first but boy when we got into the swing of things she really took off! When the time came to record the music video she came in costume and even greased her hair back because she was playing the main Greaser "Johnny." In the class I was at the time I was looking for examples of adolescent development stages. I worked with my whole class to pin point actions and reaction of students in the program and identify way they might act that way based on the research.
In 2012, I had the honor of working with TWO great girls! They were friends and really fun to work
with. One was very talkative and outgoing. She always had something to add to the conversation. The other girl was very timid but when she was comfortable she had great ideas and was fun to work with. The two girls were almost opposites in temperament but that worked in my favor because they balanced each other out. This time I was working with another girl from my class to make lesson plans and lead our group to the successful completion of our music video. We had to work together to create lessons that would allow us the appropriate time to create the video and, also, incorporate teaching literary devises throughout the whole process.
This project is a great experience. I think I would even try to do something a little smaller scale when teaching literature in my classroom. It helped me to see how you can do something |
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out-of-the-box but still teach successfully. I believed it was possible, or course, but It was really great to see it happen in person. To the left is the video from 2012 it was really fun to work with all the students (each group had four or five middle school students and three or four university students). I like to see students get really excited about learning, and this was a really fun way to do that.