Professional Growth Plan Daniel Johns This year, I have faced many challenges in learning to teach and I addressed

d those challenges in specific ways to improve my teaching. Resistant students During my first year in the classroom I was confronted with the challenge of resistant students after taking over an 8th grade class; my students were stuck in the mindset that I was not the real teacher. Subsequently, students were ignoring my directions and pretending that they didnt understand things that they actually did. Midway through a stalled lesson I asked everyone to pack up their materials and I proceeded to deliver the following message, I know that Im not Mr. Smith, but I am the teacher. We have people in a panic right now because there is a new face in front of them. If you stay focused on the math in class and in your homework, I promise that you are all capable of learning from me. From that day forward, the class resonated composure and productivity, as it had previously for my mentor. Resistant staff Coming from a strong education program in Michigan State, I entered the classroom this year with great vigor and a plethora of instructional strategies that I wanted to experiment with. My energy was frequently met with veteran teachers in the building preaching their status quo of the way (we) do things. I was eventually able to break through some of the bias to compromise by carefully selecting which innovations to test and planning the leg work of their implementation. For example, rather than saying We should all do some kind of mathematics attitude survey this year, I generated the survey, printed them, and handed them out to teachers; all that was left to do was for the teachers to pass out the surveys and drop them off in my mailbox. Upset parents In the first month of teaching a mother contacted me, displeased about her sons grade and perceived neglect of his learning style. In response, I arranged an in-person meeting with the mother to discuss her frustrations. In the meeting, my primary focus was to listen. I have seen parents become combative when they feel that the teachers or administration are ignoring their childs needs to push them through a system that is not working for them. In this case, listening provided the parent with the comfort that I genuinely cared about her son and would make accommodations for this learning. Additionally, I provided the mother with some physical evidence to mull over (a sample homework assignment and a printed progress report to show her sons missing work) in order to support my feelings that her son was at least partially responsible for his poor performance. Managing Incorrect Responses In the early stages of the school year I was admittedly very green when it came to facilitating smooth, rich in-class discussion regarding specific mathematical content. The greatest area of struggle came in connecting and synthesizing students responses when a response was inaccurate. I would often be caught off guard and essentially ignore the response without much additional commentary. I began studying my mentor as consulting other veteran math teachers, taking careful notes on how they handled these situations. I was able to progress from a Nope, thats not what I was looking for, response to There are a lot of good things in that answer, lets see which parts we can use. I also allowed myself to slow down and focus my thoughts before charging ahead with the discussion; I have become more comfortable with my own think time which has prevented me from dodging incorrect responses and allowed me to use them as learning opportunities.

I have identified three areas of growth in my teaching practice that I would like to continue to work on. Below, I detail those three areas and discuss what activities and resources I will use to improve my practice in these areas. 1. Unit Planning During the internship year, I had the opportunity to generate my own instructional unit plans for following the Wiggins and McTighe guide of Understanding by Design (UbD). Using the UbD model allowed me to thoroughly research the goals and essential understandings of a unit, while being cognizant of anticipated misconception and overarching questions. I valued the experience of unit planning greatly but am quick to identify this as an area of focused improvement. Many areas of teacher improvement evolve with continued experience in the classroom, whereas unit planning can be aided by outside, controlled resources. For one, I can continue to engage myself in current, content-specific research related to the unit at hand. Using tools such as Google Scholar and the NCTM database I can gather data-driven analysis of my units topics. Additionally, I can look to my Michigan State community and the veteran teachers in my building for insight on unit plan questions like Overarching Understandings and Anticipated Misconceptions. Actively seeking to understand the depth and breadth of each unit of instruction will not only improve the units and lessons themselves, but will in turn foster my growth as a lifelong learner. 2. Differentiated Instruction A great challenge for me during my first year teaching was differentiating instruction to maximize learning opportunities for my students. Entering the year I had focused my differentiation on developing multiple ways to present a topic so that multiple learning styles would be receptive to the content. I learned quickly, however, that I need to be prepared to both scale up and scale down the cognitive demand of each lesson as well. To aid the process of growth in differentiating my instruction, I will use concise, consistent formative assessments. Ideally, I will become consistent in using pre-unit assessments as a tool for establishing learning levels in my class; these assessments will be unit-specific and thus, will be tailored to each students content-specific learning. I would like to employ more frequent inclass formative assessments such as peer-to-peer tutoring, checkpoint quizzes, and hand signals to indicate assignment progress. Finally, I am going to begin adding two boxes to my lesson plans which specifically address how to raise/lower the cognitive demand of the given lesson. 3. Fair and Consistent Classroom Management A final area of professional growth lies in the consistency of my classroom management. Despite conducting an organized, productive classroom, I have noted areas of irregularity. Simple illustrations include sporadic collection of homework, wavering discipline for minor in-class disruptions, and not developing a system for allowing students to use the bathroom or get materials from their lockers. To improve this facet of my classroom management, I want to first be reflective of my current teaching practices. I have several video recorded lessons from throughout the school year as well as extensive journals and annotated lesson plans which I intend to review and analyze for moments of (un)successful supervision. Second, I will consult my mentor teacher. As another experienced resource, and one who has seen my development as a teacher, I will inquire about his interpretation and advice to helping me reach my classroom management goals.