Mary Hawkins

InTASC Standard: The teacher seeks appropriate leadership roles and opportunities to take responsibility for student learning, to collaborate with learners, families, colleagues, other school professionals, and community members to ensure learner growth, and to advance the profession (InTASC, 2013).

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Brief Description of Evidence:  

The evidence I have chosen for this standard is a healthy snack and activity calendar I completed in my EDUC 240  Introduction to Physical and Health Education for Elementary Teachers in the spring semester of 2022. In this assignment, we were tasked with choosing a month of the year to create a calendar to send home that included a healthy snack or activity for the student every day. Along with the calendar we were to send a letter to the family explaining what the calendar was for and why it was important. I chose to also include a list of ingredients they may need as well as instructions and ideas on some of the activities that I felt may not be as common.

 

Analysis of What I Learned:

 Throughout this activity, I was able to learn about how difficult it can be to create healthier snack choices that younger students could be more open to trying. I was also able to learn more about the food recommendations based on a child's age and what food group the snack is coming from. Personally, I don’t feed children often so I was surprised to learn what some of the portion sizes were for a third-grader. In designing the snack options, I also learned that some items may not be as readily available for all families because some healthier options tend to be more expensive, so it was important to take into account families that may need assistance in providing these snack options to their child. When designing some of the activities, I wanted to keep in mind things that the students would be able to do at home with day-to-day items. I knew that not every household would be able to go out and buy things for each activity so it was great to be able to research and find ideas from other teachers and parents online of what some fun, active, things to do at home were. 

I was able to see a lot of John Dewey’s theory of experiential learning while completing this assignment. According to Nickerson (2022), “Shared activities are an important context for learning and development.” This relates to this assignment in that we were challenged to create a calendar of items the students could do at home with their families. Some examples of these activities are going on nature walks together, making healthy snacks together, playing games with each other, and more.  This calendar gave the students a chance to share their learning with those they see every day.

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How This Artifact Demonstrates my Competence on the InTASC Standard:

This artifact demonstrates my competency because through this assignment, I was able to look at standards for nutrition for students at a third-grade level and compile a calendar of snacks based off of that to send home so my learner and their families could create them together. Through an activity like this, it would also be easy to incorporate community activities that would help keep the learner and their families active together. This assignment allowed me to recognize my place as an educator to help promote a healthy lifestyle without overpowering the parent and their role as the students' full-time caregiver. This can be seen as advancing the profession, as the standard mentions, because it allows our students’ families to see teachers as people who understand the needs of the students and be confident that we are able to advocate for them and provide the necessary means for those needs to be met. 

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Citation: 

Council of Chief State School Officers. (2013, April). Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium InTASC Model Core Teaching Standards and Learning Progressions for Teachers 1.0: A Resource for Ongoing Teacher Development. Washington, DC: Author.

 

Nickerson, C. (2022, March 3). John Dewey. SimplyPsychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/John-Dewey.html