Excellence in Planning and Practice

I have effectively used ongoing inquiry and learning and appropriate instructional strategies as a tool to support and enhance learning. I feel that I have exhibited excellence in planning and practice by creating very thorough lesson plans that are developmentally appropriate and feature technology to support and enhance student learning. Some examples are displayed below:

Examples of Excellence in Planning and Practice

It can be difficult to capture student attention and maintain it when using a Powerpoint to begin with. However, with remote learning, our options of conveying information to students has become pretty limited and a lot of thought is required to plan an engaging virtual lesson to teach students. I include "Bitmojis" of myself to make lessons more modern, relate to their interests in social media and technology, and of course... to get them excited to learn!

These lessons were also interactive and included games where students could answer questions on their whiteboards at home and hold them up to the screen to be checked by a teacher.

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Not only do I thoroughly plan each lesson for core subject areas to make sure that all content and behavioral objectives are met, but I put a lot of effort into planning Morning Meetings each day. I am a huge advocate for the Responsive Classroom where a daily meeting starts off each morning to build a sense of classroom community, make all students feel welcomed as they're greeted by peers, and develop important social (as well as academic) skills.

Each Morning Meeting consists of a greeting, an opportunity for students to share information about important life events, a collaborative activity, and a message that integrates inquiry and relative content.

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I have also demonstrated excellence in planning and practice by transforming the classroom environment to relate to current units and topics. I put together bulletin boards that display student work and "word walls" that incorporate the theme of the unit.

This was a bulletin board I co- created for an Antarctica unit. Each snowflake displays a "cool" fact written by each student that they learned throughout the unit.

Our "word wall" below features vocabulary words that were included in the book we used for our Antarctica unit and is displayed on an igloo. Each word flips open to show the definition.