Kaitlyn Sammons Professional Plan Podcast

The person wants to become a better advocate for ELL students and adapt math lessons to meet their needs. They want to understand the assessments ELL students take and align their lessons with state standards and language proficiency goals. They plan to attend professional developments, observe ESL classrooms, and learn more about students' cultures. They also want to connect with parents and reflect on their own practice to improve. Hello, everyone. My professional plan moving forward and after I graduate from my master's program is to learn as much as I can about how to be a better advocate for ELL students and how I can adapt specifically math lessons to differentiate and meet the needs of these students so that I can still support their learning even if I don't have an ESL co-teacher in the room with me. This coming year, we do have math sections with ESL teachers. I am unfortunately not one of them, but I still have kids that English is their second language and I still need to be able to support them as well. The first part in doing this is I want to understand more about the assessments that ELLs take, specifically the WIDA screener assessment and also the access test. I've had a little bit of experience going over what the access test scores mean, but I'd like to dive deeper into that and look at each of the categories, listening, speaking, writing, all of that, and what those scores mean in terms of their ability and where they're at so that I can adapt my lessons to be able to hit exactly where they're at. I also want to make sure my lessons align both with the state standards and language proficiency goals. So that is something I'd like to learn more about and think moving forward in all of my lessons. I would also like to attend professional developments, continue attending them. I've attended a couple for ESL – ELL students in my district, but I think I'm going to keep moving forward and going to as many as I can, learning from the ESL teachers in my district. And I'd love to do multiple observations in ESL classrooms so I can kind of see that model in practice. I would also like to learn more about students' cultures so I can implement that more into the curriculum. I know a little bit about their culture currently. We have many Spanish students, but I'd like to dive even deeper into that and learn from them. I would also like to find a way to better connect with parents and get them more involved in their child's education. I currently send out all of my messages, emails in both English and in Spanish to make sure I'm communicating well with them. But I'd love to learn how I can more reach out to the community and get involved. Lastly, I plan to be very reflective in my practice by not only monitoring the language acquisition of students, but making informed decisions and reflecting on my own practice to see what the students need, what's working, what's not working, and how I can adjust and make things better because there's always room for improvement. Thank you.