Professional Development

What “individual professional needs” have you identified? 

Initially, most teachers are mainly focused on planning lessons and managing the workload. So my needs are mostly related to being able to manage time efficiently, maintain professional boundaries, and create meaningful lessons. Particularly, I think that being able to create lessons that are accessible to all students (have options for lower achieving students) and that aren’t the same structure every day. As a beginning teacher, I’ll also have a lot of needs related to financial planning, pensions, benefits, and working with the union. Finally, learning how to use MyEdBC on a regular basis will be a professional need that I’ll get used to.

2. What teaching areas of interest or areas of professional growth would you like to work in the coming year? 

In addition to working on differentiated learning, and variety in lessons, I would also like to learn more routines that I could use on a regular basis to help student engagement and make the classroom a safe place for those that need predictable structure. As someone teaching PE and Computers, which I didn’t teach in practicum, I would like to know more about what I should emphasize in these classes, and how to teach more project-based classes.

3. What kinds of professional learning opportunities are you interested in?

I would love to learn how to gamify the classroom, and provide safe but competitive opportunities for students to participate in the class. I would also be interested in technology tools, including hardware, software, and AI, that either students can use, or will help reduce the time in my workload.

4. Have you already engaged in professional development over and above the BEd program? What was it? How did it inform your teaching? Did it have an impact on student learning?

We attended a couple of Pro-D Days over the course of my practica. I attended sessions related to numeracy, Indigenous learning, resiliency, and adaptations. The sessions on adaptations gave a lot of great strategies on how to help a variety of learners, that would both help students learn on their own, or engage them in the class in a meaningful way. Unfortunately, most of the other sessions lacked enough concrete direction for me to walk away with anything meaningful to add to my practice, even if some of the discussions they provided were interesting. I would say that I’ve gained some tools that will inform my teaching in the future, but I don’t think it’s had an impact on student learning yet.