Portfolio Responses

1.  What have you learned over your past 4 semesters?
- critical reflection (how "who I am" affects how I teach - I've always been in tune to who I am but I've never spent time looking at how that translates to the classroom and the experiences I provide for my students)
- summative vs. formative assessment
- backwards design
- inquiry learning
- workshop method of teaching
- ways to build a classroom community
- professional learning communities
- importance of recognizing and valuing student diversity (culturally responsive teaching)\

2.  Which capacities do you feel you still need growth in?
- Strategic Teacher - I feel that this is a capacity that I could always improve in.  This year, I would like to implement a "form" of writer's workshop based on my learnings from last year's field study (need to adapt it to suit both the teacher's and students' need).  I am also working on putting together a wikispace as a tool to inform students/parents about what is going on in the classroom (i.e., field trip notices, handouts, calendar, classroom expectations) and as a forum to interact with the concepts being taught in class.
- teacher leader

3.  What are you still curious about?
- how to use wikispaces as both an informative and interactive tool
- whether we will have any course work/learning around the capacity of teacher leader