Professional Growth

The PDs that we had to attend in the beginning of the school year didn’t help me much, but the weekly staff meetings and in-service training held with the rest of the school staff was all in all a great learning experience. It does take up extra time after school, but I soon realized that participating even in the after school activities is part of being trained to be exactly like a real teacher. Here are some new things I learned through these experiences:

•Child Study Team (CST) – I’ve been noticing uniqueness in some of my students and had wondered what I should do to address their differences. My master teacher did provide me with some information, but it was the CST in-service that really explained the whole process in more depth. It was also interesting to find out what difficulties other teachers were facing at, and I really enjoyed watching the school, the administrators, and the teachers put their heads together to figure out better ways to support our students.

•Accreditation – With accreditation having been the hottest topic in all schools last school year, it was really neat to be able to be a part of all the excitement and anticipation as our school celebrated for its accreditation yet also faced new challenges of meeting the future expectations of WASC. One thing that impressed me the most is how the staff was able to pull together everything in sync to make this happen.

•Deaf and Hard of Hearing Guest Speaker – It was really neat having a professional guest speaker come in from the States to share with the teachers everything about DHH students, and the services that we can provide to such students as a school. Extremely useful and advanced technologies were introduced, and although we are far from getting such equipments in, it was very interesting to find out about all the possibilities that my students my have.