Spring 2018 Completers’ Perceptions of their Program Preparedness

When asked to describe their strengths, teacher candidate offered comments such as the following:

• Creating positive relationships with students and integrating a variety of informal and formal assessments to continuously gauge students' understanding, and the ability to create meaningful, engaging activities to meet the diverse learning needs and styles of all students.
• *Developing relationships with the students and taking vested interest in them as individuals. *Understanding and implementing content standards *Being flexible with the schedule and the lesson plan based on the needs of the class *Meeting the needs of all learners by providing differentiated instruction and addressing different learning styles *Ability to self-reflect on lessons and areas of improvement. *encouraging critical thinking in students and HOTS.
• My areas of strength include early childhood education, giving accommodations to those in need, redirection, teaching lessons and changing at the last minute if needed, communicating with parents and students, diffusing problems/situations between students, conducting myself in a professional manner at all times, time management, classroom management, gaining and giving respect, and implementing lessons that align with CCSS.
• One of my biggest strengths is meaningful use of technology. I was able to encourage my first mentor teacher to use Google Classroom more effectively in her day-to-day lessons, and the students enjoyed my lesson by completing a HyperDoc (Google Docs).
• I have a grasp on effective questioning skills that encourage my students to use higher-level thinking skills. I maintain a respectful and positive repoire with my students. I am able to align my lessons to Common Core and Maryland State Standards. I incorporate and use various forms of technology for instruction, assessment, and data review and collection.
• I feel that I have greatly improved my classroom management techniques. This is something that is hard to get a grasp on while taking classes. The internship experience was very beneficial for practicing and adjusting my own techniques while having the support of my mentor teacher.
• Classroom management and developing/maintaining a respectful and healthy classroom environment.
• Multi-tasking multiple schools with diligence. The ability to be flexible. Maintaining records. The ability to deal effectively with multiple administrations and teaches. Maintain communication with teachers to stay aligned with classroom lessons. Development of a safe learning environment where students feel comfortable communicating and learning. Creating rigorous lessons that are aligned with common core standards.
• I have learned a ton about language learning--both theory and methods--from my classes at NDMU, and I have been able to put the theory into action in my lessons. I think that I have learned how to be creative in terms of addressing all four language domains within each lesson.
• I believe I can make students feel comfortable to ask question during class in front of their classmates. I believe every question is worth an answer. In addition, I strongly believe students who ask questions are extremely brave and ask questions others are afraid to ask. In other word, the brave students are also assisting everyone in the class. Even if the material may be clear to most, review of the material can be good for all students.

When asked how they have made an impact on student learning, the teacher candidates noted demonstrating NDMU’s efforts to comply with CAEP standard 4 (Component 4.1 regarding Impact on P-12 learning and development):

• I have effectively impacted my students through my lessons by tailoring them to the students' specific needs and teaching them in an effective manner. I have measured this through their feedback, pre-/post-tests, and projects based on the lesson.
• I believe I impacted the learning of my students by demonstrating my own enthusiasm for learning and desire for each student to succeed within my instruction. I think by really taking the time to learn more about my students' interests and experiences to make the content relatable and demonstrate the real world application has really helped my students grasp the content and skills in a meaningful way. I measured my students learning frequently through both informal and formal assessments whether through observation, as I consistently circulate around the room during instruction, or through various written and oral assessments, such as with quick writes or turn and talks, for example, during instruction with an exit ticket or summative assessment at the end as a more formal assessment. By having a variety of ways to assess students' learning, I am able to identify strengths and areas of need for each student and for the class as a whole.
• I care about my students even if only there for a short while. I develop relationships with my students and they know I care about them personally as well about them as students. I spend time sharing myself and my experiences with the students. I believe in bringing context to learning. Content is not isolated information. Linking authentic experiences to content gives meaning to it. I love having students link their experiences to learning as well. I love having active learning moments, like a project based learning style to engage learning through doing. Student learning was measured through FA, observations, anecdotal records, discourse, graded work. Multiple opportunities to reveal the holistic student.
• I measured learning through assessments and interviews mostly. With one student I sat with him discussing reading activities to help him improve/work on his reading comprehension goal and as a reflection his assessment grades related to comprehension increased. I also worked with a few students with algebra comprehension, they were visually more comfortable participating in class and showed an increased in assessment data too.
• A teacher who has observed me during my second placement told me "You're good. You teach your students as a friend, while still maintaining a respectful and professional relationship." I would agree with this statement. Through formative assessments and summative assessments (put together with my mentor teachers), I have been able to effectively measure my students' learning and growth.
• Many of my students made huge growth academically as seen in their CCSS classroom assessments. In addition, I noticed growth in smaller increments in their 4 domains of language, and applauded their little successes like grammar skills we worked on and reading abilities (as noted in formative assessments) as well as large accomplishments like PBAs and the noticeable differences in their writing skills seen in writing journals.
• I measured my students learning by using Kahoot as review and/or exit tickets. I hope I influenced students to at least not dislike math. My students appeared to not regret being in class and some even appeared excited to be there.
• I believe I impacted the learning of my students by differentiating my lessons to suit my students' needs. By differentiating and using different teaching strategies, such as direct instruction, student-led instruction, small groups, etc, I saw an improvement in students' assessment. Not only did I see students improve with assessments, students were able to explain their work and explain to the class the steps to solve these problems.

FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Notwithstanding a very small ‘N’ in fall 2018, the spring 2018 and spring 2019 data were, for the most part, comparable. A few items fluctuated. For example, criterion #31 “Develop your own SLOs” had a mean score of 3.3 in 2019 but only a 2.75 in 2018. We can attribute this increase, in part, to a greater focus on the action research component which is often integrated into the mentor teacher’s personal “Student Learning Objectives.” Another variation was found in criterion # 30 “Understand the PARCC Assessments” resulting in a mean score of 2.55. This language was changed on the 2019 spring survey because we realized that not all teacher candidates are responsible for preparing for the PARCC assessments. However, they must be familiar with “standardized assessments” in general. Thus the mean score jumped to 3.10. A similar increase in “classroom Management” could be attributed to the newly developed GoogleDocs Resource Center on classroom management and a stronger emphasis on these strategies in several courses.
2. The entire range of median scores was a low of 3.07 (parent connections) to a high of 3.74 (creating a respectful environment) in spring 2019; in spring 2018, the range was from a low of 2.75 (SLOs) to a high of 3.78 (creating a respectful environment).
3. The quality of narrative comments seems to have improved, especially with respect to teacher candidates noting how they have impacted student achievement. This may have resulted from asking candidates to offer an example of how they have done so. The breadth of responses was very insightful as well, ranging from how they documented these improvements on a daily basis with 'exit tickets' to how they did so using formative and summative assessments; some provided insights into how a group of students improved while others offered a single student as an example. Action research has also helped to provide a meaningful tool by which teacher candidates can more readily plan for and assess this growth in student achievement.