CSTP Growth and Development
How it was going…
One of my lowest self assessment scores, and something I have been looking to improve on for some time now, was CSTP 6.3: Collaborating with colleagues and the broader professional community to support teacher and student learning. I scored myself at level 2 - I had talked to colleagues and administrators during training and informal meetings. Their feedback had been valuable at times, and there were some things I tried to apply to my teaching. However, I had yet to find ways to co-teach or design integrated lessons across subject matters.
What Changed…
Throughout various staff trainings and meetings, I was especially appreciative of one of the veteran teachers at my current school, David Hall. He has years of experience teaching creative writing and poetry. I set a goal to find a way to involve him in the induction inquiry process. One of the options for observation was to co-teach a lesson with another teacher. I thought I could find a way to simultaneously improve at CSTP 6.3 and meet the observation requirement. I looked at areas in my curriculum that would fit with a cross-curricular assignment or activity. During the second semester, Visual Art students work on Visual Journals. The Visual Journal gives students an open, creative, mixed media space to create. Over the course of the semester, they take a hardcover book and turn it into an original work of art. This serves as a sort of bell-ringer/warm up activity during the first 15-30 minutes of every class and Mondays are fully dedicated to journals. A common technique in altered books or visual journals is blackout poetry. I thought that I could have Mr. Hall come in and teach a lesson on his specialty, poetry, and I could handle the art half. I reached out to him about helping out with this. He was excited to lend a hand and we scheduled a time to teach a lesson together. My coach was able to cover Mr. Hall’s class while he came into the art room to help teach. Mr. Hall delivered a great lesson on found/blackout poetry. The students were very engaged in the material and I felt like they got much more out of it than they would have if I had tried to throw something about poetry together and focused more on art. The collaboration had a positive effect on student achievement in their visual journals. The poetry and art they created exceeded my expectations.
My final CSTP self assessment came in much higher, Level 4: Integrating - Collaborates with colleagues to expand impact on teacher and student learning within grade or department and school and district levels. I feel like going forward I can use the relationships I have built with Mr. Hall and other staff at the school to continue to improve on my collaboration with colleagues.