Katrina Letwiniuk
"Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday"
TEACHER COMPETENCIES
Planning for Learning
This lesson plan for discussing different flags and their symbolism shows that I am able to use the Alberta Program of Studies to create a lesson that engages and educates a grade 2 classroom. Using the Alberta Program of Studies to understand the general and specific outcomes helped me guide this social studies lesson in a way that ensured the students achieve a deeper understanding of the assignment. For this lesson plan, I kept in mind that my students were very busy and needed to have movement breaks often. Ensuring that I add this into my lesson plan helped the lesson itself run smoothly. I aim to be very conscious of which modes of learning I am hitting in each lesson so that I don't forget any. Although I might not be able to reach each mode of learning in every individual lesson, there is enough time in the day for me to try and reach every student along the way.
Facilitating Learning
During my practicum I used the transactional teaching strategy which uses indirect and direct teaching. I read a book called "Dear, Deer" that had a focus on homophones. While I was reading it, I would ask questions to the students to ensure they are following along in the book and reaching the understanding that words can sound the same but are spelt differently. While this sounds like a simple way to facilitate learning, I found that sometimes I would take advantage of reading a book to the students as a time filler and would forget to make the bridge to the classroom learning. After the book was finished, I had the students each come up with their own homophone. Whether it came from the book or they have thought of it on their own. They shared this idea with a elbow buddy so that each student had a chance to say their idea. Allowing all students to share ideas instead of asking one or two students is another strength that I believe I am mindful of when teaching my lessons.
Assessment
Creating meaningful assessment will be a skill that I will need to work on, but I need to start somewhere. I created this rubric in accompaniment to a checklist that was given to the students before they wrote their weekly journal. The checklist covered the five main components of what needs to be included in their journal. This came at no surprise, but was more of a challenge to the students as they needed to check all five in order to choose their own topic for next week. Before they students wrote their journal, we went over the rubric as a class and I explained what a journal entry would look like for each level. Students had a great understanding of what they needed to write in order to reach an Exceeding level, it was up to them to spend the time showing me their best work. After they wrote their journal, students checked off each box while going through their work. Showing the students the rubric before allowed there to be less questions about why they received the mark they did. Many students reached the exceeding level, but it also showed me that students needed a refresher lesson on some components.
Classroom Environment
This is a classroom sketch that I created that involves many different to enhance studnets learning. I believe that classroom environment is one of the most important aspects to a successful classroom and this involves how a teacher set up their classroom. When creating a learning environment there needs to be thought put into students’ needs for physical, social, cultural and psychological security. There are many aspects to my sketch, but one that I believe has a huge impact is how the students are seated. This year, I learned many strategies to create safe learning environments and my favourite is numbering off students at tables. This simple, yet super effective strategy helps the flow of lessons by letting the teacher choose a number to do certain tasks, ask a question, and much more. The teacher can also use this strategy to group low-ability students, medium-ability students and high-ability students without the students feeling as though they are being categorized.
Professional Responsibilities
In my first year of practicum, I was fortunate enough to be involved with a Collaboration Planning Circle (CPC). This collaboration between teachers, parents, and specialists helped a student achieve higher results in her learning and made the student love school again. In my journal, I explain what exactly happened in the meeting and how it affected the student, but I didn't talk about how it affected me to a great extent.
This artifact is from 2016, but I decided to keep it on my portfolio because it helps me reflect on these meetings, which are now called the Collaborative Response Model (CRM). In my final practicum, I eagerly joined the CRM meetings because I saw how much of an impact they made on the students. This type of collaborative meeting is evolving and I love to be apart of it every step of the way.
This has affected my philosophy because it furthered my thinking about that it is not only my WANT to help students outside of the classroom but the NEED to help them. As a teacher it is my responsibility to make relationships with students, parents and other teachers. The importance of this has really changed for me since being involved in CRM meeting, and I am so happy it has. I believe this will make me not only a better teacher, but also a better person and role model for my students.