EDPG addressed: EDPG 10 - Leadership and Collaboration

Name of Artifact: Evidence of Collaboration

Date of Artifact: Spring 2017
Courses in which Artifact was implemented: ED 361 - Practicum and ED 489 - Supervised
Teaching

Throughout my student teaching experience, I had several opportunities to interact with parents,
students, and other school professionals. These experiences have been successful because I was
able to build good relationship with the persons I interacted with. To establish a positive
collaborative relationship, I always started by introducing myself via an introductionary phone
call. Then, I kept in touch with parents by calling them anytime I wanted to make them aware of
their childs academic performance. I also used emails to keep in touch when parents
specifically requested email updates.

Before my first parent-teacher conference, I called the parents I wanted to meet and scheduled
appointments with them. Some of them did not return my call and my email. Some said that
they did not have time so I offered to have a phone conference with them at their most
convenient time. To prepare for the conference, I gathered all data I had on their childs
assessments and feedback to give them a big picture of their child from a learning and behavior
point of view. I connected very well with the parents. They told me they appreciated what I was
doing for their child. During the parent-teacher conference, I proved to be a responsible, caring,
confident, and professional educator by maintaining a professional behavior, displaying
punctuality, using an open communication with parents, explaining students grades, making
decisions based on moral, social, and ethical ideals, giving constructive feedback, focusing on
student learning, preventing, addressing, or resolving issues in the classroom, and finally
maintaining a positive relationship between students, parents and myself. In my discussions with
parents, I informed them that my goal was to ensure continuous learner growth. I also shared
what my educational practices and policies were, which was affirming my role of leader in the
classroom. Not only I assumed a leadership role but I always took responsibility for student
learning. I noticed that my positive collaboration with parents helped me maintain a positive
collaboration with their children because they knew that we all cared about them.

Another good experience that shows how I assumed leadership and responsibility for my
students is when I took the initiative to call on a meeting for one of them. As soon as I noticed
that his behavior had changed and that he was showing some signs of depression, I went to talk
to the school Guidance Counselor and the Intervention Specialist/Student Support. They both
agreed to meet with me and my student the following day. I explained to those school
professionals that I was aware of my students situation. He lives with his grand-mother and
does not see his parents very much. I had talked to his grand-mother before regarding his
attitude in my classroom. He usually never does his homework, never studies, and does not pay
attention in class. Nevertheless, I worked hard with him to keep him on track and to make sure
that he would not fail, and he was finally doing better. This student spent a few days at the
hospital a few months ago due to depression. Since then, I was particularly paying attention to
any change in his attitude or behavior. Therefore, when I noticed that he was very quiet and no
longer smiling, I automatically tried to avoid another crisis and called on a meeting. Both the
Guidance Counselor and the Intervention Specialist/Student Support reminded the student that
they were there if he needed to talk to someone. They started the meeting saying that the reason
why we wanted to talk to him was because we cared for him, not because he was in trouble.
After only a few minutes, the student admitted that he had lost motivation and did not know what
was going on with him. He had had a passive attitude in all his classes. He had not talked to his
grand-mother about it. I told him that I had noticed that he seemed a bit different and I wanted to
make sure that he knew that he was welcome to talk to us if he needed to. This meeting proved
to be very effective. The following day he seemed like someone else. He asked many
interesting questions in my class, participated, and seemed happy to be there. The collaboration
between the school professionals and myself helped this student feel better and re-gain
motivation.

I developed the same kind of collaboration with my cooperating teacher during my practicum.
She had a classroom of 23 students which included 3 students with learning disabilities and 2
students with behavior issues. So while she was teaching the class, I did some one-on-one
instruction with those students, used scaffolding, talked to them individually when they were
misbehaving, and build some strong relationships with those students. My cooperating teacher
let me discipline them when needed, she noticed the progress I made with those students, and
thanked me for accepting to take on any responsibility she was assigning me.

Last, I collaborated with my school to find opportunities for me to advance the profession. I
asked the high school principal if we could meet to talk about any professional development
opportunities. He informed me about the different opportunities that were available in the area
and that could help me learn more about educational practices, policies, learner growth, and how
to advance the profession.