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M’Laura Yates-Telling My Story 1

National University

TED 690

Telling My Story

M’Laura Yates

6/9/2019
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Abstract

This is a reflection of my journey thus far as a teacher and how my experiences relate to

the domains of the California Teacher Performance Expectations. I have gained

experience within my classrooms over the past 3 years that I will reflect on including

substitute teaching and being an intern for the past year.


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Achieving Competency

Domain A of the California Performance Expectations addresses engaging and

supporting all students in learning. Multiple subject candidates must demonstrate the

ability to scaffold the State Standards and provide rigorous instruction in Reading,

Writing, Speaking and Listening, and Language. Lessons should connect subject matter

to real-life contexts and provide active learning experiences through the use of a variety

of developmentally and ability-appropriate instructional strategies (California Teaching

Performance Expectations, 2016). I am confident that I am meeting this expectation. I

have taught in a classroom full of diverse learners and have learned many different ways

to reach all students. Through the observations and evaluations by my site administrator

and my University Support Providers, I have received much positive feedback about the

differentiation I provide during lessons. Each lesson comes with its own set of

difficulties, depending on the range and abilities of the students. In order to make the

content understandable and accessible for all students I must constantly reevaluate the

ways I am scaffolding the information I wish to impart.

Strengths and Needs

Domain A is an area of strength for me because of the diversity of the population in my

town and the schools I’ve taught at. I have also taken many relevant courses and have a

B.A. in Multicultural Education, which helps with my understanding of different types of

learners. This also helps with the area of understanding and organizing subject matter for

student learning and planning instruction and designing learning experiences for all

students. One of the areas I achieved significant growth in this year was creating and

maintaining effective environments for student learning. It was quite a change moving
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from a private school to a public school this year and I think one of my deficiencies was

large class management. This year I had an average of 29 students with many different

types of learners. By the end of the year I had really grown in classroom management

and my ability to teach multiple types of learners and pinpoint the areas needed for

growth. I continue to need more strength in the area of assessing student learning. There

are many computer programs where I can track the students’ degree of learning. I am

learning how to progress monitor students who are at a high risk for failure and which

interventions are appropriate to apply in those situations. I have developed a well-

organized system of tracking students’ progress and data through AimsWeb, which is

very helpful. Another area I would like to grow in is differentiating instruction more

often for my gifted students. I had many different activities for these students that were

extensions of what my average students were completing, but I’d like to brainstorm and

come up with more engaging activities that are different from each other. I find after a

while that many of the extension activities seemed to have the same theme and the gifted

students would lose interest quickly.

Potential Competencies

One of the main areas I would like to focus on in Domain A is the area of writing. I think

my students were strong writers for narrative and informative writing tasks, but they had

a hard time with the opinion writing. I need to reach out and collaborate with more

experienced 2nd grade teachers through our grade-level professional learning community

to determine a more effective approach to teaching introductions, conclusions and

transitions within each of the writing performance tasks, but especially the opinion

writing task.
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Rationale

The second artifact I chose to include in my ePortfolio that demonstrates my proficiency

in engaging and supporting all students in learning is a lesson plan I developed for my 2nd

grade students to learn to use Place Value. The feedback I received from both my site

administrator and my NU Support Provider was very positive. The students were all

engaged and there were multiple levels of learning being achieved. The 3rd artifact I

attached is a literature review about an article detailing how to use the views of students

to help promote inclusion in education. This is an important issue because under certain

conditions, these conversations between students and teachers can help stimulate actions

that promote inclusion in ways that can serve all learners. The last artifact I am attaching

is a video of me teaching the place value lesson I detailed above. This is useful evidence

showing how the lesson I created was implemented and successful.


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Reference

California Teaching Performance Expectations. (2016). Commission on Teacher

Credentialing. Retrieved from https://www.ctc.ca.gov/docs/default-

source/educator-prep/standards/adopted-tpes-2016.pdf?sfvrsn=0

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