Leadership and Collaboration
“The teacher seeks appropriate leadership roles and opportunities to take responsibility for student learning, to collaborate with learners, families, colleagues, other school professionals, and community members to ensure learner growth, and to advance the profession.”
This was one standard that I struggled to achieve. During my time at the middle school I attended IEPs, staff meetings, and professional development for SMART Goals. The IEP meeting was especially interesting because I had no expectations going into the meeting. However, the student was a sixth grader and I had worked with the student as much as my cooperating teacher had, so, I was asked to sit in. I was able to suggest things and really make an impact on the student’s IEP. I was able to speak to the student’s mother and reassure her of what was happening in the classroom. It was also a great opportunity to collaborate with the sixth grade team, being primarily in seventh grade.
The staff meeting was interesting from the standpoint that I never realized how small the school was. For some reason I assumed that there were a lot of teachers that I had not met, nope. The school was so small and everyone knew everyone. I thought this was awesome because it was so easy to collaborate. The structure of teaching also made this very easy. My CT taught three seventh grade history and two sixth grade. This system of multiple teachers teaching the same sections supported collaboration between teachers.
During the spring I found it much more difficult to participate with parents, colleagues, and other school professionals. I was not told of many of these opportunities and I also coached baseball while at the high school. Baseball truly took up most of my time after school. I would leave just as school was ending to get to the field to drag/mow in order to be ready for practice. There were weeks where I had students stay after to take tests but I was not sure who to collaborate with, so I did not and made my own lesson plans for ten weeks. This was great experience with planning, but did not do much for collaboration.
Baseball, however, was a great experience and was one I will most likely have every year for a very long time. I was an assistant on JV but both teams worked together and were only separate on game days. I was active in every aspect of the team; we had practice every day, except Sunday. Our record as of May 6, 2014 was 8-3, which is better than the team has done in a long time. It was a very rewarding experience and the bonds I made with players will be carried forward on my journey.