Professional Growth Plan

This Professional Growth Plan is written in Summer 2016, with the intention of setting my main professional goals for the 2016-2017 school year. I believe that when I receive my first contract where I am in a classroom consistently, this plan would increase to include more specific targeting goals in terms of what I want to develop for my students.

General Goal

I would like to narrow my focus on improving classroom climate.

Areas of Focus

  1. Health and Career units that will allow students to self-manage and self-regulate themselves better.
  2. Clear classroom expectations.
  3. Encouraging students supporting one another.
  4. Dealing with student conflicts immediately, and not allowing them to take up extra class time when it is repeatedly the same students with conflicts. Mediating said conflicts rather than creating solutions.

Activities

  1. Beginning health and career units on understanding emotions, creating empathy, and learning about conflict resolution from the beginning of the school year and continuing with them consistently throughout the year. I think parent involvement would also be great in this area, by letting parents know about what the students are learning and hopefully getting those ideas reinforced at home.
  2. Creating clear, concise classroom expectations with the students’ aid, and following through immediately with modelling expected behaviour. Reinforcing positive behaviours and adherence to classroom expectations.
  3. I believe students are much better at encouraging each other through continued use of techniques such as buddy groupings and peace circles. Peer assessments through ideas like “three stars and a wish” are useful for this, as well as getting students to self assess on how empathetic they think they are. It is also important to provide opportunities for students to voice their problems.
  4. Dealing with student conflict immediately is one of the areas I have the most trouble with. It is really difficult to do this in an effective enough manner so that the issue will not arise again. However, I think units on problem-solving, as well as all the above-mentioned activities would help significantly in this area.

Professional Growth Plan Involvement

I think it is always a great idea to be discussing teaching pedagogies and methods with colleagues and mentors. Mentors in particular can be great in helping narrow the focus of a goal or create more specific steps to achieve the goal. Getting the school community involved would also be a great way to make sure the students’ learning is applicable outside of just the classroom; for example, if there were some school-wide sessions on problem-solving. Establishing a connection with the counselor would also be a great idea since many of my areas of focus have a social-emotional basis.