Professional Development
Cultivating a Growth Mindset with Arts Integration & Steam
Education Closet webinar: Hosted by Mary Dagani and Laura Wixon
Certificate of Completion obtained: Saturday, April 7th, 2018
Professional Development Hours: 1.5
Having a growth mindset in secondary math is crucial to students’ perseverance and positive attitudes about mathematics, as well as a major contributor to student self-confidence. I’ve been wanting to learn more about growth mindset and strategies to incorporate into my teaching. Considering this workshop was considering growth mindset with a STEAM approach, this sounded very interesting to me.
In this workshop, the concept of growth mindset was discussed in great detail. The Artful Thinking Routine was used to introduce not only to have participants immediately involved in the growth mindset process, but also to demonstrate a resource for STEAM integration into teaching students about growth mindset. Throughout the workshop, we learned about the major differences between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, why we as educators should care about this topic, and how growth mindset relates to how the brain changes with learning. We also learned about what a false growth mindset looks like and how to avoid this in our classrooms by replacing such practices with ones that encourage a real growth mindset environment. Specific sentence frames for providing authentic student feedback were also addressed. Finally, several specific strategies for integrating a growth mindset into the classroom were discussed, such as the book Beautiful Oops and creating goal setting charts.
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While I have not been yet able to apply what I’ve learned here in my practice, I have come out of this workshop with a much clearer understanding of growth mindset. Additionally, I greatly appreciate that I learned specific strategies that I will be able to implement to foster growth mindset with my secondary math students.
Everyday Strategies to Build a Sustainable Culture of Kindness
edWeb.net webinar: Hosted by Christina Tinari
Certificate of Completion obtained: Tuesday, April 10th, 2018
Professional Development Hours: 1
As mentioned in my portfolio, one of my biggest goals as a teacher is to foster a positive classroom culture. Kindness is one of the ways that I believe I can achieve this not only between me and my students, but between students themselves. I greatly wanted to learn more specific strategies about building a culture of kindness in the classroom, thus I enrolled in this webinar.
The webinar begins engaging participants by asking us to reflect on kindness in our own lives. From here, we take a look at the incredible importance of kindness and why kindness is needed, such as to reduce bullying, to boost student attention and learning, and to create positive bonds. We also learned about strategies to starting kindness at both a classroom and school-wide level, such as clearly including kindness in class rules and making kindness a part of recognition programs. Another focus of this webinar was how to hold a successful kindness campaign and prevent it from failing. Empathy was an important topic addressed as well, as it is an integral part of being kind; we learned about the role empathy plays in fostering kindness in our students. We also learned about effective strategies to build a culture of kindness in our classrooms, such as daily or weekly check ins, role play, practicing emotional management methods, giving students the support they need, and reading books with kindness as a core value portrayed.
While I have not been yet able to apply what I’ve learned here in my practice, I feel that this webinar has given me some great strategies that are specific and practical to building a culture of kindness in the classroom. Additionally, I appreciated learning about the importance of kindness, as this encourages me even further to apply what I’ve learned with my students.
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Screenshot of resources shared during the webinar
Classroom Management Tips for New Teachers
edWeb.net webinar: Hosted by Shannon Holden
Certificate of Completion obtained: Sunday, April 15th, 2018
Professional Development hours: 1
As a novice teacher, the more I learn about classroom management, the better. I was excited to learn that edWEb had a classroom management tips session especially for new teachers. The wording of the webinar title, “tips” especially captured my interest, as it sounded as if I could learn specific, practical, and effective strategies in this session.
A main focus of this webinar was about using discipline plans to manage misbehavior effective in the classroom. This also included examples of rewards and consequences. We also learned about how to conduct a proper and professional office referral. Other important aspects of classroom management that is important for novice teachers to practice were covered, such as “withitness”, building positive student relationships, finding a balance between “too nice” or “too strict”, parent communication, and how to get support from administration. Classroom management pitfalls of novice teachers were also brought to our attention, such as empty threats, put-downs, sarcasm, and embarrassing students. We also learned about how to react to certain misbehaviors, such as calmly following the discipline plan and not taking such misbehaviors personally.
While I have not been yet able to apply what I’ve learned here in my practice, I feel that this webinar was very beneficial. I have a much better understanding of what a discipline is and how to carry one out to not only better manage behavior, but also how to work efficiently with administration. Additionally, the specific strategies suggested in this webinar appear very practical and I feel more confident about going into the classroom with ready-to-apply methods that have been shown to be effective.
Screenshot image taken from the webinar
I have access to resources from this webinar, including a new teachers survival kit document and a parent phone call script. However, considering these materials are exclusive to members of the edWeb community, I will not post them on my portfolio.