When I started the Induction Program this year, who would have imagined the way this year would have turned out? The Covid-19 Pandemic has really affected changed so much of what we do, but it has also changed the understanding of what teachers have to go through on a daily basis.
When I started out this year, I had identified CSTP 2 (Creating and Maintaining Effective Environments for Student Learning) as my biggest strength, and CSTP 4 (Planning Instruction and Designing Learning Experiences for All Students) as my area with the most room for growth. I felt that I had good control and classroom management skills, so I would be able to use my ability to maintain that effective learning environment in a way that would allow me to focus on what I felt was my need to improve my lesson planning and design experience.
When we didn’t return to school, I began to realize how important it was to connect with my students and their support systems in order to keep my students from falling off the system. At Ortega, we take pride in our outreach and social-emotional learning connections with students, so the focus of my work was to ensure I addressed student needs while connecting with both students and parents.
For the past year, I have been engaging student through emails, instant messages, phone calls and letters using available technology such as Google Voice, Instant Messenger, Parent Square and Clever, in order to reach out to parents and students who have been having difficulty participating in class activities. Many of my students, along with their parents, were frustrated and overwhelmed by situations at home, work and in their personal lives. But the constant attempts at outreach have significantly improved our student’s performance at school, and enabled many of my students to graduate early.
The attention to student development, parental participation, and professional development really showed that I was continuing to improve professionally and personally. CSTP 6 (Developing as a Professional Educator) was the most improved area in my Final CSTP assessment, and the category that significantly improved during the past year.
‘Teaching is the one profession that creates all other professions.’ --Unknown