Educators engage in professional learning.
This standard is one that I feel expresses one of the main reasons I love teaching as a profession. One of my biggest fears in high school was getting a job that I disliked and felt like the standard 9-5 career. I did not want a career that felt stagnant, so teaching is a profession that has variety day to day. That being said if you do not love teaching you could make it feel like a 9-5 if you are unwilling to grow with your profession.
What I love about teaching is if you want to stay a great teacher the learning never stops. If you are constantly open to learning you will enrich the mind and spirit. When you are not learning new things or having new experience, you fall into the trap of time speeding by. Learning and experiencing slows down time and allows you to process new things. When you take professional learning seriously, you equip yourself with better teaching tools and tools to perceive the world around you.
As a teacher it is incredibly important to have a trained and opened mind to stay on top of your career. If your mind is shut off to new learning that will only be a disservice to you and especially to your students.
I have been working in SD52 for seven years now. Three years as a on-call EA and four years as a on call uncertified TTOC. I also worked on a LOP in 2023 from September to December. During my time working I have not had too much trouble teaching the subjects I need to. The only time I could not for the life of me figure out how to teach is when I would substitute in the high school for a high level science or math class. This is why I try to stick to subbing in elementary classes as I find the subjects are easier as a substitute to understand and teach. That is until I taught on my LOP and it dawned on me how much I needed to brush up on. Math was the easiest to teach for me as it was grade 2/3 math and I know many tricks to help remember how to solve equations. The real challenge was literacy, which was something I never truly thought too deeply about.
I started by getting my students to start weekly journals. At the start of the year the grade 3s needed three sentences and the grade 2s needed two sentences. What surprised me is how many students could not write basic words, and what surprised me more was my inability to teach how to spell correctly. Students would ask “why is there an E in that word” to which I would respond “its a silent E.” Which would then be followed with “why is it silent,” and back to me saying “english is weird.” I did not know why there were all of these rules in english that make it difficult to learn and teach.
Now after taking this program I was able to take the “Basics of Decoding and Spelling Instruction” course from the International Dyslexia Association Ontario. This opened my eyes to the complex code that is the English language. Using knowledge from this course I have already been able to apply it in some classes as a substitute. One class I helped three students in a grade 2 class understand how to use the “biting E”, some say the “bossy E” but I found the biting E was more effective. a word like “bite” for example, the E bites the first vowel to make it shout its name “I”.
This is just an example of how taking professional development has improved my ability to teach and enhanced my own learning!
