Professional Growth Plan

Part 1: This year, I have faced many challenges in learning to teach and I addressed those challenges in specific ways to improve my teaching: 1. Transitions Over the course of this year I have been very fortunate work with my mentor teacher and to be observed by the mathematics consultant within the Macomb Intermediate School District. During a conference after an observation at the beginning of the year they brought to my attention that I may have been moving too fast from one part of the class to another. They were worried that in the transition I was losing students and that this would lead to confusion and the lesson would not flow smoothly. So after this conference during my lesson planning I focused on identifying where my transitions were within my lesson and what I would say to smoothly shift the focus of the class. In addition I placed a car near the ELMO in the classroom that said Do you have their attention? and Transitions to remind myself to focus on both. At first I needed to make a conscious effort to keep these aspects of my class in my mind but then it became natural to me after working on it every day. Now at the end of student teaching I am able to notice how students are reacting to my shifts within the classroom and I am able to see when I need to slow down and wait for them or where I need to repeat myself. I have also noticed that the class runs much smoother because the class is working together and on task. 2. Reaching all learners As a beginning teacher reaching all students is a daunting task. Being tossed into a classroom for the first time it was easy to reach the outspoken, driven students and key in on the struggling students. The difficult part was reaching the middle students or the quiet, reserved students. First semester I established relationships with many students and went out of my way to focus on my low-achieving students. As we, as student teachers, reflected during MSU classes about reaching students it became very apparent that I needed to place more focus on all students. The middle students needed extra attention too. So headed into the second semester I reminded myself daily that I needed to reach many different students. To improve this practice I engaged in a case student about a very reserved student, who otherwise may have not been a focus for me, and focused on his needs within the class. After reflecting and ultimately writing a paper about the experience it helped me to see that I could do this on a small scale with all of my students. I now consciously make an effort to talk to all students and take notes of interests, needs, and skill level daily in order to reach my goal of reaching all of my students. 3. Daily assessing students Starting out the year I found it easy to assess the students who shared work at the board or students that I talked to while they were working in groups however I could not generalize those answers for the entire class. After class I could confidently say where about a third of the students were with the material but I was missing the other two thirds. My mentor suggested exit slips or warm-ups for assessment. I began to implement these into my instruction and they gave me more concrete evidence of what my students took away from a lesson. I stuck with these methods for the rest of the year and after working on my reaching all learners goal I noticed that knowing my students helped as well. Not only does knowing who is in your

class help to give you a sense of what level the class is at but as students feel more comfortable talking to you because of an established relationship they will more openly discuss areas of concern in the lesson. Through strong relationships and distinct assessment each day I am able to now gauge on a daily basis how my students are grasping the material.

Part 2: I have identified three areas of growth in my teaching practice that I would like to continue to work on. Below, I detail those three areas and discuss what activities and resources I will use to improve my practice in these areas: 1. Summaries Over the course of this year there has been a large emphasis on strengthening the explore part of the lesson and some based on the summary however I feel that this is an area that I can still improve upon. During the explore of a lessons students work confidently with each in pairs and then I push student thinking as I circulate the class. I then choose students to present the focus of the lesson for a group discussion. I want to continue to improve my facilitation of student to student discourse during the summary of the lesson. This year I have attended the Connected Mathematics Users Conference where I was able to learn from and talk to other teachers about their summaries and how they promote student to student discourse in this part of the lesson. I found this very useful to me and plan to seek out and attend other professional conferences like this one next year. In addition I want to continue to observe and question other teachers who successfully implement lessons of this format. I feel that watching and learning from them will help me to implement stronger summaries with in my own class. 2. Hooking the students into every lesson Another focus of this year was the launch during a lesson. The purpose of the launch is to hook the students into the lesson and give them a reason to want to do the work and learn the material. Over this year I have had a few great lesson hooks by creating a scenario where the students needed to figure out an answer to a question or showing a video to engage the students however there were many lessons that were lacking in that area. Some of the material does not lend itself as easily to creating catching launches. So this is something I would like to continue to improve. My goal is to have an engaging launch for every single lesson. During the fall I attended the Mathematics Technology Day Conference with keynote speaker Dan Meyer. His approach to launches absolutely blows me away. After the conference I had many resources to use to create launches similar to his. I plan to use these resources to reach my goal. Dan Meyer has a blog with many links with in it to gather information. Also given that there are many resources are online, I plan to use and incorporate them into my classroom. To ensure I keep with this goal I plan to think about launches when I unit plan. I am hoping that by looking ahead in the curriculum it will allow me to plan out where I can add in these points of motivation for my students and ultimately build stronger lessons for students to succeed with the material.

3. Use of technology Going into this year of student teaching I was very motivated to incorporate technology into my classroom. At times I incorporated applets, videos, used a promethean board, ELMO and general internet for lessons. However I was the main operator the technology. Students

became engaged but I want them to be the users of the technology so going forth in my teaching career I would like to seek out more ways I can incorporate technology into my classroom, where ever I may be teaching, and focus on students use of the technology. As mentioned above I was able to attend the Mathematics Technology Day Conference in Macomb, MI and learn about many different ways teachers are incorporating technology into their classes. The conference gave me tools to use within my class however I do not feel like I have completely utilized these resources in my classes this year. I also took an online teaching and technology course during my time at state that introduced me to sources like jing, wikispaces, Photoshop, and other applications. I plan to compile these resources and implement them more fully to enhance my students learning and engagement within my classroom.