Standard P

P: Understanding of teaching as a profession

Teacher candidates positively impact student learning that is:

1. Informed by professional responsibilities and policies. All students benefit from a collegial and professional school setting.
2. Enhanced by a reflective, collaborative, professional growth-centered practice. All students benefit from the professional growth of their teachers.
3. Informed by legal and ethical responsibilities. All students benefit from a safe and respectful learning environment.

My Understanding

I believe Standard P qualifies me for a role that entails responsibility for the intellectual, emotional, and physical welfare of students.  Teachers’ legal and ethical responsibilities impact the entire school community and function both for the students and the teachers’ wellbeing.  As teachers, we hold each other accountable and support each other in professional cooperation so that students may benefit from our teamwork and our consistency.  Students are in school to learn from professionals, so we must behave as such, providing trustworthy role models and an assurance of safety so that students may be free to develop their own professional skills. Finally, a teacher, just like any other professional, can always improve.  I must take advantage of personal and group-oriented opportunities for professional development and reflect thoughtfully to turn my learning into enhanced learning for my students.

Metareflection

Birthday balloons for our librarian

My students benefit from the professional atmosphere my colleagues and I maintain throughout the school, and our cooperation in community role-models for students the positive potential for accomplishment that is inherent in a mutually supportive work environment.  As evidenced in the syllabus that my mentor teacher and I created, I uphold professional standards of behavior in my classroom and make it clear to student what they can expect of me in the way of professional behavior and why.  That is, if students see that all their teachers behave professionally and enforce the same school-wide policies, they will trust our consistency and begin to holds themselves to higher standards as well.  In addition, students will feel safe in a school where the teachers cooperate in supportive community, evidenced dramatically by the surprise birthday party we threw the day our librarian passed a birthday milestone.

I must never stop learning—nor do I want to!  Professional development is none other than the lifelong learning for which I signed up sometime soon after conception.  As  teacher, my students depend on me to stay on top of the current content that they need to learn and the current best practices that can help them learn.  Recent examples of the professional growth I have turned to good account for my students include post-observation interviews with my principal and meetings with other district teaching in my content area to plan common curriculum.  Whenever my principal observes my teaching, I complete pre-observation and post-observation interviews with him (see pre-observation form example), with the goal being for me to identify what areas of my instruction could be improved and how.  After these interviews, I take the decisions we made and apply them in class, resulting in one case in much more consistent classroom management.  Curriculum meetings with other teachers are also an excellent way to improve instruction, because we collaboratively identify essential learning objectives and share best practices for meeting students’ needs.  My professional growth does not end with certification, and I already have a list of areas I plan to improve.  Bring on the workshops!  (In addition, my desired professional growth is grounded in my personal philosophy of education.)

Finally, from fire drill procedures to FERPA protections, I am responsible for the wellbeing of the students in my classroom.  Laws regarding education and school procedures have been designed with the welfare of all members of the school community in mind, and I maintain a safe and respectful learning environment by enforcing the school policies detail in the teacher and student handbooks of the school, by role-modeling genuine, active respect for all my students, and by insisting that my students actively respect each other.  Only when put-downs stay down can students really be built up.