Group Meeting Reflection

Please describe an experience where you worked with a colleague or multiple colleagues to help them improve their instructional practices.

During my time here at Carroll, I have been fortunate to work with a great group of exploratory and specials teachers for professional development. This group of individuals has become a community where it is safe to share and collaborate together. Especially through the AIW process, I have been able to work with these colleagues to improve lessons, analyze student work, and review instruction. In our AIW group, we focused on higher order thinking and ways to help students increase their understanding.
One example of working in my AIW group is when a colleague brought a tigers lesson for us to score where they were teaching the concept of compare and contrast. Through looking at the task and other materials provided then scoring the task, it was obvious that the students understood the basic concept but weren’t digging deeper to in what they read A suggestion I had to increase higher order thinking was to take a place that the student knew well and have them compare and contrast to the main setting of the book; the book’s school to our school, the city in

It has been an interesting process for me to learn how classroom teachers look at and use data, especially from standardized tests to drive instruction, and interventions to help students grow and excel in their learning. Being a specials teacher I do not get much time to sit down and talk with any grade level teams, however whenever I join the fifth grade team I feel like a member of their team and not an outsider. I enjoy the fact that they are a respectful community that listens to me when I share the informal data that I have collected in my tigers times class along with looking at NWEA and Iowa Assessment and other data to help group