Professional Experience

Goals for Professional Development

Improve my firmness in enforcing class and/or school rules and expectations, including following through in keeping students back at recess/lunch or confiscating phones

Establish strong relationships with students by building rapport, including engaging in purposeful conversations to learn about individual students, learning student names, integrating this knowledge and understanding in discussions throughout the class and around the school

Improve the clarity of my task/activity explanation, modelling and scaffolding by ensuring the task/activity aim is clear, providing guidance in its completion, for example through questions, prompts and/or starters, examples, co-constructions in class (particularly in improving students' literacy and writing in English) that can help with differentiation

Build a repertoire of and draw upon meaningful strategies that engage higher-order thinking and are linked to outcomes, extend student thinking into complex issues (both past and contemporary) and develop skills necessary for summative assessments

  1. Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning

5.1.1. Demonstrate understanding of assessment strategies, including formal and informal, diagnostic, formative and summative approaches to assess student learning

  1. Know students and how they learn

1.1.1 Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of physical, social, and intellectual development and characteristics of students and how this may affect learning

1.5.1. Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of strategies for differentiating teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities

  1. Know the content and how to teach it

2.1.1. Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the concepts, substances and structure of the content and teaching strategies of the teaching area

  1. Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning

3.2.1. Plan lesson sequences using knowledge of student learning, content and effective teaching strategies

  1. Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments

4.1.1. Identify strategies to support inclusive student participation and engagement in classroom activities

  1. Engage in professional learning

6.3.1. Seek and apply constructive feedback from supervisors and teachers to improve teaching practices

Each student brings a virtual school bag to school with a particular set of practices, skills, resources, knowledge and values gained from their personal context and upbringing (Thomson, 2002).

Socially inclusive teaching incorporates the diverse cultures, experiences and knowledge of students and their families, allowing students access to dominant "cultural capital" through interpreting and transforming the curriculum (Thomson, 2002).

Student-centred learning experiences centred with students emphasize a reciprocal partnership between the teacher and student, building learning as the pair collaborate together (Neumann, 2013).

Effective teachers create a sense of relatedness with students, understanding their needs, engaging in effective communication and creating engaging learning situations (Scanlon, 2004).

Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) emphasizes how the teacher transforms discipline-specific content knowledge in the best way for students (Loughran, 2013)

CoRes are the big ideas needed to be grasped by students within curriculum areas; PaP-ers bring CoRes to life through action, exemplifying aspects of subject-specific practice (Loughran, 2013).

Disciplinary understanding enhanced through authentic, higher-order intellectual activity in tasks/activities by solving problems, developing new understandings and drawing upon the tools/methods of the discipline area (Ritchardt, Church & Morrison, 2011).

The Instructional Core comprises relationships between the teacher, student, content and task. The Instructional Task completed by students predicts performance, thus higher-order tasks equip students with knowledge and skill (City, Elmore, Fiarman & Teitel, 2011).

Constructivism

Quality Teaching Framework - fostering higher-order intellectual thinking requires quality learning environments of high and explicit expectations and positive teacher-student relationships; learning must be significant in its meaning to students, draw connections to their identities and experiences and connect to contexts outside the classroom (DET, 2003).

Focusing on developing positive relationships and feelings of belonging and connection to school improves behaviour, underscoring schools as essentially relational institutions where genuine respect for and valuing of students is essential (Graham, Truscott, Powell & Anderson, 2016).

Student behaviour is transactional and is shaped by relationships with teachers and/or peers and the school environment (Graham, 2017).

Teachers can create an emotional bank account with students and build emotional credit by showing genuine interest in students, allowing for challenging conversations to be had (Covey, 1990 cited in Sarra, 2014).

Authentic assessment involves understanding areas students have difficulties with, developing assessments/activities that provide insight into how students are thinking and equipping students with the knowledge to reflect on their own thinking; feedback provides interventions in progressing students to the next stage of their learning (Earl & Timperley, 2014)

Using modelling and scaffolding informed by an understanding of progressing along the mode continuum; moving from spoken text to joint constructions of texts and developing into independent construction of texts (Derewianka, 2014).

Engaging in professional learning requires a willingness to suspend beliefs and assumptions, entering a space of liminality in which issues, perspectives and ideas are considered and enabling deep, transformational learning (Nelson & Harper, 2006).

A focus on planned, relevant and quality professional learning is critical to improving pedagogy; dual focuses on improving student outcomes and developing and maintaining teacher quality in schools (Treble, 2009 in Manuel book)