The Teacher Education program at Lindenwood University adheres closely to the Missouri Teacher Standards, ensuring that all students meet these standards through demonstrated evidence. Throughout the program, teacher candidates craft Rationales and Reflections illustrating how their experiences align with each standard. These reflections draw upon knowledge and experiences supported by various artifacts generated in their courses, which are then evaluated by their professors.
For this particular course, students are required to upload a document supporting their Rationale and Reflection for Standards 8 and Standard 9 of the Missouri Teacher Standards. It’s recommended that students begin conceptualizing these reflections early in the course. The artifacts supporting these standards include a Teacher Interview, Observation Journal, and Observation Timesheet.
Standard #8, Professionalism, emphasizes the teacher’s role as a reflective practitioner who continuously evaluates the impact of their actions on others and actively seeks professional growth to enhance student learning. Quality indicators under this standard include self-assessment and improvement, professional learning, and adherence to professional rights, responsibilities, and ethical practices.
Standard #9, Professional Collaboration, highlights the importance of effective relationships with students, parents, colleagues, and community members. Quality indicators include participation in induction and collegial activities, collaboration to meet student needs, and fostering cooperative partnerships to support student learning.
Students are guided through a step-by-step process to develop their reflections, which involves understanding the standards, selecting relevant artifacts, describing how these artifacts connect to the standards, and reflecting on their learning and areas for further growth. An example provided illustrates this process for Standard 5, focusing on creating a positive classroom environment.
Finally, students reflect on their development throughout the course, noting what they’ve learned from creating artifacts and their experiences, as well as identifying areas for continued learning. Through this reflective process, students deepen their understanding of teaching standards and professional growth.
Standard #4 Critical Thinking
The teacher uses various instructional strategies and resources to encourage students’ critical thinking, problem-solving, and performance skills. (1) Students actively participate and are successful in the learning process.
Quality Indicator 1: Instructional strategies leading to student engagement in problem-solving and critical thinking
Quality Indicator 2: Appropriate use of instructional resources to enhance student learning
Quality Indicator 3: Cooperative, small group, and independent learning
Artifact:
Co-Teaching Lesson Plan
Course: EDU xxxx
Rationale:
Standard number four states that the pre-teaching candidate uses a wide variety of didactic practices and materials to encourage students to reach higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, including using critical thinking, problem-solving, and performance skills. For students to obtain these higher levels of thinking, they must participate and have the opportunity to be successful in these various activities. It is crucial in the primary grades to provide students with several valuable and effective activities engaging them on a specific content idea to develop the knowledge necessary for their success in future lessons and even upcoming grades. These high levels of thinking are crucial to student achievement because without reaching high levels of thinking regarding content information, the students will not obtain a deep level of understanding. It is the prospective teacher’s responsibility to consistently create and develop several engaging activities that will catalyze student learning and push them into higher levels of critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
The artifact that I chose to display my competency for standard number four is a co-teaching lesson plan that I created along with two of my classmates from my Differentiation and Classroom management class. This lesson was created with the co-teaching teaching style, station teaching in mind. We chose this co-teaching strategy because this would allow us the opportunity for our students to experience the same content (solids, liquids, and gases) in three different ways. Center one included the creation and identification of the states of matter in a root beer float. Center two included the reaction of vinegar and baking soda to inflate a balloon, and center three included creating a solid, liquid, and gas flipbook. This purposeful technique behind our lesson is one example of how this lesson fulfills quality indicator number one. Providing our students with different experiences regarding solids, liquids, and gases will provide them with a deeper understanding of the material while also engaging various preferred learning styles to increase our overall effectiveness. Another way this artifact fulfills quality indicator number one is the structure of the lesson. The lesson contains an anticipatory set, a clear objective, modeling for each station activity, lead guided practice, independent practice, closure, and assessments (both formative and summative). Utilizing these components in the lesson is another way the lesson was created to engage student engagement.
Quality indicator two focuses on appropriately utilizing instructional resources to enhance student learning. With this in mind, the anticipatory set is an interactive song that pairs the physical attributes of solids, liquids, and gasses with movements to engage kinesthetic learners. The purpose of the video is to call on prior knowledge of the previous lesson and to help them focus on the day’s activities. Another way this artifact fulfills quality indicator number two is the hands-on activities developed in the centers. One center focused on liquid and gas by inflating a balloon with vinegar and baking soda in a two-liter bottle. Another center focused on all three states of matter by identifying which components of a root beer float correspond with the state of matter using ice cream and root beer. These materials were specifically chosen to have hands-on experience as they discovered and investigated the states of matter with a small group of their peers. Being able to experience these states of matter at their fingertips allows students with meaningful and engaging experiences that they will expand upon to develop higher levels of thinking.
Last but not least, quality indicator number three states that the lesson consists of cooperative, small group, and independent learning. This lesson fulfills this quality indicator because the different centers allow for different types of learning. The hands-on experiments in the balloon station and the root beer float stations allow for a cooperative, small-group experience. The students have the opportunity to collaborate and bounce ideas off of one another to answer the teacher’s questions as they go through the activity. Alternatively, the students have the opportunity to summarize what they have learned from the experiments by creating their own flipbook of the states of matter. The utilization of the various learning styles provides students will a well-developed experience that encourages critical thinking skills and engages several learning preferences.
Reflection:
When creating the co-teaching lesson plan, I learned that co-teaching requires more planning and collaboration because you engage in a lesson as a team. A strength of this assignment is that the lesson incorporates three unique experiences for the student to engage in different ways. This activity encourages higher-order thinking processes from the students and allows students to display their knowledge in multiple ways. A weakness of this assignment is that it would be difficult to achieve in a traditional classroom setting considering the materials and number of teachers required to carry out this lesson successfully. One way this lesson can be altered to solve the problem is to ask for class donations and alter the booklet station to a completely independent station without the direction of a teacher.
What I’ve learned in my differentiation and classroom management class will crucially impact my future teaching. I have learned several ways to adapt to my student’s needs to be most successful in all areas of learning. This includes the format of the lesson being taught and individual components of lessons that can be modified to engage all learning preferences. These ideas will impact my future students because they will be engaged in numerous high-quality lessons that are purposeful in boosting their critical thinking skills and understanding of the overall content. To improve my understanding of standard seven, I will attend professional development opportunities frequently to stay on top of best practices of differentiation and ways to modify instruction. I will also regularly meet with colleagues to brainstorm new ideas regarding the development of lessons and possible modifications that I can adopt in my classroom to drive student learning.
