The professional learning and ethical practice standard is important for ensuring that teachers stay engaged in ongoing professional learning practices. With this standard, teachers are asked to continually take in new practices and evaluate current choices and actions. Teachers should be able to adapt their methods to meet the needs of every learner in their classroom. I incorporated this standard through communication with parents, professional growth opportunities, and memberships to teaching societies.
While student teaching, I sat in on all parent-teacher communication including: sitting in on parent teacher phone calls when problems came up, sitting in on nine-weeks conferences, and attending IEP meetings. We discussed how best to communicate with the parents in the future, ways to move students towards their individual goals, and how we as teachers could best support every student.
One of the things that I could attend as a pre-service teacher was a local math conference where teachers from kindergarten to 12th grade gathered together to share their experiences and brainstorm the many ways these standards feed into the various grades. Also, I attended a training on recognizing and working with students with Tourette’s Syndrome, school safety training, and a training on empowering individual students to call out their peers’ disrespectful behavior without teacher assistance.
I joined the National Science Teaching Association (NSTA) and the National Education Association (NEA) that gives teachers access to changing podcasts, webinars, and online courses that will heighten their teaching experience. I became a member of Kappa Delta Pi (KDP) an honor society focused on education that sends out weekly forums where teachers from all over can share their experiences.