Standard Overview:

The teacher persistently and critically examines his/her practice through a continuous cycle of self-improvement focused on how he/she teaches and works in a global, digital society. The teacher is responsible for engaging in professional, collaborative self-renewal in which colleagues examine each other’s practice in order to adjust instruction and practice based on analysis of a variety of data.

The teacher contributes to the effectiveness, vitality and self-renewal of the teaching profession through investigation of new ideas that improve teaching practice and learning for students.

The teacher is actively engaged in learning with colleagues in a way that models collaboration and collegiality to improve his/her practice, addressing questions and issues related to the school and student achievement.

Relevant Description:

During my student teaching placements (30 hour, 75 hour, and student teaching) I collaborated with my host teacher to identify skill gaps and focused learning goals for students. From this collaboration I developed an "Action Research" (AR) project to focus on closing those identified skill gaps and increase overall student achievement in social studies. The skill gaps existed in map reading and content specific vocabulary, which was leading to the overall lower scores in social studies in general. The guiding questions for my AR were, "Will map-reading skills increase by teaching content specific vocabulary? Will introducing interactive mapping programs increase map overall reading skills?" This combined approach was to not only help increase student achievement in social studies, but also increase student overall vocabulary skills, which is a county-wide initiative. The AR project also introduced 21st Century Skills by having students work with interactive and animated maps. The focused vocabulary strategy was the four-level-framework for teaching vocabulary. This method requires a good understanding of present levels of learning by the majority of the students to ensure good word selection. The content specific vocabulary is put into four categories based on prior or possible prior knowledge, with level one being no or little prior exposure to level four containing relatively known words. All the level one words are taught and defined prior to reading or teaching content, level two words are taught during reading or teaching the content in order to help make connection to the lesson.  

Reflective Analysis:

The AR went really well given the limited amount of time for implementation. The gains from pre-test to post-test were greater in males than females, but the females had an overall higher average on the pre-test. The total average gain was about 5%. I feel that longer implementation would have yielded higher overall results. My host teacher was going to continue the vocabulary strategy as well as the interactive and animated maps connected with the online textbook "eActivities" offered by Holtonline at "my.hrw.com," which should yield those results. I noticed immediately after doing a online activity as a pre-teach for a political map activity the students were completing the maps with a higher rate of accuracy and less difficulty than my previous experience with those students.

Plans for Improvement:

The need for a longer period of time for implementation and learning how to better maximize a 44-minute class period for instructional delivery will enhance the learning outcomes of these strategies. The need for more computer lab time of classroom sets of laptops would greatly enhance the use of interactive tools as well as the other online tools available with the textbook. Having the ability or access to speach to text software will enable differentiated learners to access new tools or compensate for writing modifications. Having instant access to a "highlight" and click dictionary and thesuarus will help students write better and make better word choices. Technology tools seldom have a single use or outcome and by using these tools in the classroom on a regular basis the limitations of a 44-minute class period may be dimished.