Educators engage in professional learning.
Standard 7 is the ability for educators to further their learning and engage in professional development. Professional development could be within a school setting or outside of schools and the classroom. Professional development seems to be pretty broad and it can look a number of different ways. You could be in a room listening to a lecture or meeting with other educators or go outside and learn on the land in different ways. To me, standard 7 means I get to learn new things that I may not get to experience every day in schools or the education community. I can pick a specific thing I am interested in to work on or potentially pick something I need to learn more about depending on what is being offered. This standard also means that I can make connections with like-minded educators outside of the school I would be working in who I maybe would not normally meet.
The artefact I am providing for this standard is some of the resources I got from the Early Learning Conference held on January 29th. I attended two sessions, a reading power one with Adrienne Gear, and connecting classroom to community with Vanessa Elton. Both were very informative, gave lots of resources and gave examples that sparked ideas of things I could incorporate in my class during practicum and once I am certified. The artefact I will specifically be posting a picture of is a pamphlet from Vanessa Elton on how to successfully start taking your class outside of the school to learn. The pamphlet is broken down into steps to take when bringing your class into community especially if you have students with diverse needs.
This pamphlet reflects standard 7 because it was a part of a professional development day and I learned a lot about taking your class into community that I did not know beforehand. The session was full of people who shared the same interest in wanting to learn more about this topic. We gained knowledge from the speaker but also from the other educators in the session who had experiences with their particular class. I am grateful that so many resources were shared with us because it will make it easier to try and implement this in our classes now that we have a framework to build upon. I appreciated being able to attend this conference because participating in professional development will further my own learning so that I am able to further my students learning. It will also bring new topics or areas of interest to my attention and I will be able to make new connections with different people.
