Focusing on the Young-Ins

Week One: August 26, 2014

This week we discussed what we want to accomplish and focus on as a group. We all shared ideas of things we would like to learn more about and areas we feel we could improve upon in our practice as teachers. We decided that we would like to find a book to read as a group which would give us practical applications in our teaching. 

One book proposal was "Understanding How Young Children Learn: Bringing the Science of Child Development to the Classroom" by Wendy L. Ostroff. This book focuses on children's brains and how they learn best. We thought this would be a good choice for our group because it gives us suggested activities that we can use in our classrooms, not simply theories which do not work. The book has chapters dedicated to the concepts of children's learning, development in regards to science, motivation, attention, memory, cognition and action. The author of the book also seems very credible because she has been developing curriculum about children's learning for 15 years and bases all of her ideas on her research as a scientist. We all agreed that learning more about children as a whole will give us insight into how they learn as our students. 

However, there were some objections to reading this book including: lack of dedication to reading it weekly, not applicable to all members (mainly Joyce), and the logistics of waiting on its arrival after we order it. Our team captain, Angela, agreed to work out the details and make the final decision as to whether or not we use this book as our resource for our PLC this year.

Introducing our PLC

Our PLC this year includes four wonderful ladies: Angela Wong, Kaila Svoboda, Joyce Graves, and Bekah Steiner. 

Some facts about us:
All of us teach elementary students.
We have a varied amount of teacher experience.
Three out of four of us teach only lower elementary (preschool through first grade). 
We all love kids!

The norms for our group include:

Consideration for others

Meeting and starting on time

Making an effort to come prepared

Our group's mission statement is:

We will discuss ways of being an effective teacher according to best practice.

Some ideas we emphasized during our discussion of what we want our PLC to look like included:

- Practical applications of strategies we can use in the classroom

- Learning how we as teachers can engage our students at their differing levels

- Providing a supportive environment to discuss ways to improve our teaching

- Opening up our minds to new ideas and methods of teaching literacy, math, small groups, language instruction, etc.

PLC location: Bekah's room at 3:30 pm on Tuesdays.