The competent teacher understands the role of the community in education and develops and maintains collaborative relationships with colleagues, parents/guardians, and the community to support students’ learning and well-being.
I selected to use the SIOP Lesson Plan from my English as a Second Language Methods and Materials class as an artifact for Profession Teaching Standard 9 because it demonstrates my ability to work with another teacher to create a lesson plan. For this assignment, I was instructed to work with another classmate to create a SIOP content lesson plan for a class of students made up of English learners. I selected the classmate that I thought I would work best with, and also learn from. Together we created an in-depth, creative, and engaging lesson that would be much worse off without our collaboration. We each brought different skills and ideas to the table while creating the lesson, making it a blend of our teaching styles and strengths. The goal was to work together to create a lesson that meets the cultural and linguistic needs of English learners, and this lesson plan shows our ability to work together and create a strong lesson.
This artifact is an appropriate representation of the standard because it shows how a lesson can be created with two different teachers with different teaching styles, ideas, and skills. It shows that together, we were able to scaffold and shelter the lesson in order to be comprehensible to linguistically diverse students, without compromising any important content that needs to be learned. Knowledge indicator 9J states that the competent teacher “participates in collaborative decision-making and problem-solving with other professionals to achieve success for students.” Throughout the lesson, this knowledge is demonstrated by my classmate and I working together to discover ways to make the content comprehensible for linguistically diverse students. Working together allowed us to see multiple ways to solve this problem in a creative, engaging, and comprehensible lesson.
Creating this lesson plan helped develop my skills in working collaboratively with a classmate or future colleague. This was a great learning experience because it opened my eyes to other perspectives and ideas that I would not necessarily think of on my own. This lesson was much stronger than if I would have created it on my own, because the discussing my thoughts and ideas made them stronger. This shows the power in working collaboratively in order to give students the best instruction possible. Even though it can be difficult sometimes to find time for collaboration, it is essential. In this case, I collaborated with another peer to create a lesson, but in schools there will be many other topics needing the benefits of collaboration.