Professional Responsibility Reflection

Ruth Stewart EDSC 7550 03/31/2019 Professional Responsibility Reflection Growing up, I found myself surrounded by teachers– not just in school, all the time. My mom was a teacher, all of her friends were teachers, my godmother was a teacher, the list goes on. A lot of things I learned about the professional responsibilities of teaching, I learned at home, before I ever went to school or considered becoming a teacher myself. For example, I watched and listened as my mom and her friends constantly strove to improve themselves. They regularly attended weekend conferences and professional development sessions. When my mom had her friends over, they discussed problems they were having in their classrooms and bounced ideas off of each other about how to address them. My mom had this core group of other teachers that she was able to lean on, learn from, and learn with, and that was really formative for my understanding of the way teachers are “supposed to” interact. Of course, I’m lucky that my mom and her friends were good examples of the profession, not bad ones. Having positive role model teachers in my life has made my journey to becoming one easier, as I have concrete ideas of all of the things that go into being a successful teacher. You always try to improve your practice, you talk with other teachers about this, and you work as a team, even if you’re all in different classrooms. These ideas I gleaned about being a good teacher from my mom and her friends have been reinforced by what I’ve learned at Georgia State and my teacher resident experience at Langston Hughes High School.

As a teacher resident under the CREST-Ed grant, I’ve attend specialized professional development sessions where residents teach and critique each others’ lessons in order to improve them, hear experts speak on various important subjects, and reflectively discuss our practice in a “critical friendship group”. I really appreciate these sessions, as it’s a way to connect with other teachers and work together in order to improve the ways we teach and engage with students. These sessions have also been proven to improve teacher practice, which in turn increases student achievement (Burke, Marx, & James, 2010 & Dunne & Honts, 1998). One of my favorite sessions was when I was testing out a game to help my students review protein synthesis. It didn’t go as planned, but my fellow residents gave me some really good feedback about how to improve the game to make it work. This game and feedback are both artifacts in my “additional evidence of teaching preparedness” domain. I was able to make some tweaks based on peer feedback and use it successfully in my classroom. My students had a lot of fun, and told me that the game helped them to solidify their understanding of protein synthesis. Another biology teacher even asked me to explain it to her so she could use it in her class! Sharing resources is something I’ve learned through my experience at Langston Hughes to be an important part of working as a team. If one teacher has a great investigation, review game, or method for teaching a certain concept, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Just ask for the teacher in question to show you. If two heads are better than one, aren’t ten heads better than two? As teachers, we have a responsibility to our students to provide them with the best instruction we possibly can, which means we have a responsibility to each other to share our best resources. All students deserve an equal opportunity to succeed, and while not every teacher is

created equal, we can help each other in order to provide each student with this equal opportunity. Another piece of the responsibility we have to our students is figuring out how to teach them most effectively. This can vary from year to year, class to class, even from student to student. We cannot just provide students with the “best” lessons; we must figure out whether or not those lessons are compatible with the ways our students learn. This is where data analysis and discussing this data with other teachers comes in. As a CREST-Ed Resident, I have participated in Anchor Action Research on the use of collaborative groups for better content transfer, which has been supported in educational research (Bonwell & Eison, 1991 & Gokhale, 1995). My Anchor Action Research involved looking at a great deal of student data and working with my mentor teacher and CREST-Ed advisor to determine whether or not having students work collaboratively was effective. Though my results were inconclusive, this was a valuable experience for me, and both my presentation and final report have been included in the “additional evidence of teaching preparedness” domain. In the future, I plan to try different teaching strategies and monitor their effectiveness using similar methods in my own classroom. On a scale larger than my specific classroom, at Langston Hughes, we work in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs, made up of our content areas, such as biology, chemistry, etc.) to plan common lessons and assessments, and to discuss student performance on those assessments in order to tailor our instruction to our students’ needs. We give a lot of formative assessments and use the student performance data to tailor our individual practice during units, and this is consistent with recommendations for effective practice in the literature

(Settlage et al, 2018). However, we also use summative data to help us plan as a PLC for the next units. For example, we noticed that our biology students don’t retain content as well when looking for information themselves. One unit, we had them research human impacts on the environment on their own to predict what could happen to an ecosystem of their choosing. At the end of the unit, students did not perform well on portions of the assessment addressing human impact. So, we looked at what students had done, and decided their individual research was not as focused as it needed to be. The next unit we pulled together resources for students, and students then used those resources to predict what would happen to a cell if a certain organelle’s function was disrupted. On the end-of-unit assessment, students performed quite well on portions addressing organelles. Gradually, we started to give students fewer and fewer pre-selected resources, and worked with them on scientific research skills, so that they could one day be successful doing their own research in order to make a prediction. We continued to monitor assessment data in order to ensure we were whittling down pre-selected resources at an appropriate pace. We could have done this without the help of one another, but I believe it would have been a lot less efficient and effective. We owe this efficiency and level of effectiveness to our students. Professional responsibility, to me, means that as a teacher, I’m constantly working to improve myself and my methods in order to give my students the best opportunities I possibly can. This improvement can look different for different teachers, but for every teacher, analyzing student data, learning about and trying new methods, and working as a team is essential.

References: Bonwell, C. C., & Eison, J. A. (1991). Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom. ERIC Digest,​1-6. Retrieved September 4, 2018, from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED340272.pdf. Burke, W., Marx, G.E., & Berry, J.E. (2010) Maintaining, Reframing, and Disrupting Traditional Expectations and Outcomes for Professional Development with Critical Friends Groups. ​The Teacher Educator​, 46:1, 32-52, DOI: 10.1080/08878730.2010.530342 Dunne, F., & Honts, F. (1998). ​"That Group Really Makes Me Think!" Critical Friends Groups and the Development of Reflective Practitioners​(pp. 1-11, Rep. No. SP 038 151). San Diego, CA: ERIC. Retrieved March 31, 2019, from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED423228.pdf. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 423 228) Gokhale, A. A. (1995). Collaborative Learning Enhances Critical Thinking. ​Journal of Technology Education,7​(1). doi:10.21061/jte.v7i1.a.2 Settlage, J., Southerland, S. A., Smetana, L. K., & Lottero-Perdue, P. S. (2018). ​Teaching science to every child: Using culture as a starting point(​ 3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.