Standard+5

Standard 5: Professionalism

__Reflection:__ Having a partnership with parents is critical to success of students. In order to establish a foundation at the beginning of the school year, I send parents in my classroom a welcome letter before school starts. I also have a classroom brochure ready at our "Meet the Teacher" day so that parents can go ahead and be reading about our class and the learning that will take place. At our "Parent Orientation" I go over all of the information in the brochure, plus additional information. I also allow for plenty of time to answer questions from parents. I feel that this builds a foundation for our relationship.

Throughout the school year, I stay in contact with parents. One thing I do at the beginning of the school year is call all the parents within the first few weeks of school to let them know how well their child is doing. Now that I have had siblings of previous students, parents tell me how they still remember that phone call and how surprised they were that I was calling with good news. I also have parents fill out an online information survey about their child at the beginning of the school year. This gives me information about student interests, likes, and dislikes that I use when planning our units of study. Of course I follow the courses of study, but I use information from students and parents to delve deeper into certain aspects of what we study. I also keep in frequent contact with parents, especially those who may have some sort of special needs; whether it be academics, behavioral, or other. When necessary I contact the parents via phone call or have an in-person conference. Most frequently, I email with parents. Attached is an email series showing my contact with a parent whose child has had behavioral concerns in the past.

Additionally, throughout the school year, with the students we create Weekly Student Reports. [|Here] are examples of Weekly Student Reports from a previous school year. This gave parents a direct look into our classroom. They could see what we had learned about that week and in conjunction with my weekly emails would know what was upcoming that we were learning about. Because of this parent communication, I would have parents tell me about how students were extending their learning at home and parents knew how to help their child at home.

To continue to grow and develop myself as an educator, I ask parents to fill out an end-of-the year survey. I greatly value their opinions and use their feedback to make changes for the upcoming school year. [|Here] is the link to the survey.

As a part of EDC 707, I interviewed a fellow teacher leader on the various areas she has been a teacher leader in. This interview with her allowed me the opportunity to further collaborate with her and learn from her in the area of math. Since then, we have continued to collaborate with each other. It's particularly beneficial to student learning when we discuss low achieving math students. Below is my interview with her.

To increase my knowledge and to help myself put into place research-based best practices, I lead PD workshops when asked. I have led sessions on teaching writing, various technology topics, and one on collaboration. Below is a comment from my assistant principal from my PLP on the workshop I led.

Evidence and Comments
Ritchey, Sandy G (3/21/2011) - Ashley Dark led a session at our November professional development day. The focus of her session was collaboration among colleagues. Note: edmodo is a technology tool to encourage collaboration. The title of her presentation was Deflated? Frustrated? Have you collaborated? Description: Want to collaborate but you’re not sure how to get stared, who to collaborate with, or even why it’s important? We’ll discuss these things plus how to use edmodo as a collaboration tool. Faculty members commented on the wealth of knowledge and incredible passion displayed by the instructor. It was a successful session.