Student Teaching Standards Portfolio Introduction

Wow! I cannot believe that my student teaching experience is over. This has been such an amazing semester. Student teaching was full of ups and downs, but all and all I am so grateful for my students, my mentor teacher, and all of the help that I had along the way. I feel as though I have grown so much in my time student teaching, both professionally and personally. 

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I completed student teaching at Thompson Valley High School in Loveland, Colorado. From day one, I was able to take complete control over Civics and Psychology 1, while co-teaching AP Micro and Macro Economics with my mentor teacher. My students were a very diverse group. In my Civics classes, all of my students were freshman, but they came from a huge span of socioeconomic statuses, race and ethnicities, and  political leanings. I also had a very wide range of educational needs, ranging from many students on IEP and 504 plans (some having an in room paraprofessional with them) to many students flying through their daily work and needing more advanced daily challenges to keep them engaged. Psychology was similar in diversity; but, I also had the added challenge of having a wide range of maturity levels in my students, as I had all four grade levels being represented in my class. Each and every one of my students were such valued members of our classroom environment, and I was able to build such amazing relationships with many of them. They are what has made the ending of student teaching so bittersweet, because I am truly going to miss them so much. 

 

Every day I spent teaching this semester solidified that I am where I belong career wise. I absolutely love teaching, and have become much more confident of that now than I was before I got to do it full time. There were challenging points for sure, but all of those taught me a lesson. Teaching through a pandemic was one of those challenges, as we moved from a fully online to hybrid to fully in person learning throughout the semester. Each one of those systems had their own pros and cons; for example, one of the hardest parts of teaching fully online was building relationships, so in a way it was so great to get everyone back in the classroom at the end of March. That said, there were several points when we were in person when I had more than half of my class in quarantine, so trying to keep them up to speed was difficult. All in all, the pandemic was hard on everyone in the building, staff and students alike. That hardship gave me an opportunity to figure out my core teaching philosophy, though, which is empathy over everything. Once my students knew that I cared about them as people more than anything else, they were able to develop plans with me for getting work in as opposed to completely checking out. My students really opened up to me at several points about how hard COVID has been on them and their families, and so that was something I always kept in mind as their teacher.