One characteristic that I chose to focus on for this post is characteristic number 2: "We believe that the novice teacher should be an effective communicator." I believe that all teachers should develop effective communication skills with colleagues in order to properly collaborate, with students in order to successfully teach, and with parents to keep them informed on happenings with their child's education.
An ideal team of teachers should be able to collaborate about the content of their lessons and when they teach it. I have found this to be especially important in older grades when the students switch classrooms for different content areas. Having all of the students switch and take math, science, and social studies all at different times is difficult, but can be done with effective communication! When the teachers collaborate to stay on the same page, transitioning through the classes becomes much more organized.
I personally find communication between teachers and parents to be extremely crucial in order to effectively educate children. Parents need to be involved! Parents should be kept updated in order to know exactly what their child is learning in school at any given time. This can prove to be beneficial for many reasons, the most important being that parents can help their children with content and provide extra practice. Many students simply need an extra push at home, but they first need to know the content their child is learning. Another reason teachers should develop good communication skills with parents is so they can discuss student behavior if it becomes a problem or even recognize good behavior when a students does something notable.
The artifact I chose to display my understanding of characteristic number 2 is my Parent Communication Project from Education 401. This project is a website I constructed that parents of my classroom could access in order to see a calendar of important dates, reminders, notices, spelling lists, learning goals for the classroom, what the students are learning, contact information, and more. This type of website is easy to make and serves as a great communication tool. As a bonus, a teacher can use it to communicate with all parents at once, rather than having all of the parents call or email at different times. I even chose to add a "word of the week" that students will practice in class. Little things like this show parents that a teacher is passionate about his/her job.
The second characteristic I chose to focus on is characteristic number 3: "We believe that the novice teacher should recognize that teaching is a professional, moral, and ethical enterprise, should understand moral issues and ethical practices in educational environments, and should have developed ethical frameworks which facilitate effective teaching." This characteristic is important because every teacher should have a profound understanding for moral and ethical issues in the classroom. A successful teacher should not only have a strong grasp on his/her own morals, but he/she should also try to spread good and appropriate morals and ethics onto the students.
I believe that a good teacher must have a respectable moralistic background. If a teacher does not have good morals, what is that to say about how that teacher communicates and forms relationships with students? Teachers are major role models in children's lives. Students should be able to look up to their teachers and take away new values to hold onto for life. Sadly enough, some students pick up poor morals at home depending on the type of family they have. School should always be a place of positive values!
Not only should teachers have respectable morals, but they should be trying to pass them onto their students. Like I said before, teachers are role models, but there is more to it than that. As a novice teacher in a high poverty school, I find it crucial to teach lessons that send a message to students about good morals and values. Some students come from rough families in which the parents have unethical morals that the children are picking up. As a teacher, it is a major responsibility to teach students the difference between right and wrong: the right way to treat people, the right way to act, to right way to treat property, etc. That is why I chose my character education lesson as an artifact for this characteristic.
The character education lesson teaches the students about the importance and necessity of responsibility. For this lesson, the students are working collaboratively to choose the best class pet for out classroom. Before the lesson there is a class discussion about what pets need in order to survive. Once the lesson begins, the students are told to write about their ideal class pet, including all of its needs! The students are then broken up into small group in which they will each have the opportunity to explain their ideal class pet. The small group will then vote on which pet they think would work best for the classroom. Each group will then choose a representative to share their chosen pet with the whole class. After each group had a chance to present, the class will vote on their new class pet. After the lesson, there will be a class discussion about the benefits of the voting system used to determine a new class pet. The class will also discuss everything they will need for the new class pet and the necessity and importance of all of these things.
