Continue to develop professionally as ethical and reflective practitioners who are committed to ongoing scholarly inquiry.
Continuing your professional development is crucial to being a good teacher. I view myself as a life long learner and therefore I must always do things to challenge myself to be better. You may find me on the English Companion Ning as well as the Classroom 2.0 Ning where I am able to collaborate with teachers and therefore learn new practices, offer suggestions, and be an active member in the education world.
The simplest thing that ELA teachers can do to continue to develop is to continue to read. There is never a time where you should not be reading something. There are thousands of books out there from serious fiction to YA to pedagogical books that we should not go with out reading. The more you read, the more you know. Also, it is important to model to your students what they should be doing because if you are not reading, why should they?
Here are some books that I have recently read and found helpful:
. Enhancing Professional Practice
. Teaching Students to Read Like Detectives
. Strategies for Close Reading
. The Giggly Guide to Grammar
. Crunchtime
. Differentiating Instruction in the Classroom
I've attended a couple of Professional Development workshops with the English Department while student teaching. One that I found particularly interesting was about J.D. Salinger. We had Kenneth Slawenski, author of a J.D. Salinger biography, come and speak to the department about this interesting author. I learned a lot of very interesting information about Salinger that will help me give my future students a background on him if I were to ever teach The Catcher in The Rye.
This upcoming summer I will be teaching abroad in Thailand at the childhood level. This will be a great experience to help me improve myself professionally and will definitely be something I take with me throughout my life. As educators, we should always be pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones to help others whether it is in the US or elsewhere.
The simplest thing that ELA teachers can do to continue to develop is to continue to read. There is never a time where you should not be reading something. There are thousands of books out there from serious fiction to YA to pedagogical books that we should not go with out reading. The more you read, the more you know. Also, it is important to model to your students what they should be doing because if you are not reading, why should they?
Here are some books that I have recently read and found helpful:
. Enhancing Professional Practice
. Teaching Students to Read Like Detectives
. Strategies for Close Reading
. The Giggly Guide to Grammar
. Crunchtime
. Differentiating Instruction in the Classroom
I've attended a couple of Professional Development workshops with the English Department while student teaching. One that I found particularly interesting was about J.D. Salinger. We had Kenneth Slawenski, author of a J.D. Salinger biography, come and speak to the department about this interesting author. I learned a lot of very interesting information about Salinger that will help me give my future students a background on him if I were to ever teach The Catcher in The Rye.
This upcoming summer I will be teaching abroad in Thailand at the childhood level. This will be a great experience to help me improve myself professionally and will definitely be something I take with me throughout my life. As educators, we should always be pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones to help others whether it is in the US or elsewhere.