Digital Weebly Portfolio ProjectPart 1

1. Please define (in your own words) each type of responsibility and
identify at least one action for each responsibility that you will
employ in your practice.

Legal: As a teacher, I have a responsibility to uphold the laws set in

place by my nation, state, and school district to ensure the safety of
my students and set an example for them of an upstanding citizen.
Action: Something I can do that will help me fulfill my legal
responsibilities is make myself familiar with FERPA, IDEA, and other
education-related laws, and stay up-to-date on new laws and policies
so that I know what is expected of me.

Ethical: As a teacher, I have a responsibility to my students and their

parents to hold myself to a high ethical standard and maintain respect
in all of my interactions with them and my coworkers.
Action: Something I can do that will help me fulfill my ethical
responsibilities is establish clear rules and classroom procedures to
help me make sure that I treat all of my students fairly.

Professional: As a teacher, I have a responsibility to conduct and

present myself in a way that will reflect well on my school district and
myself.
Action: Something I can do that will help me fulfill my professional
responsibilities is keep my social media pages clean and private, and
not allow any incriminating content to be a part of my digital footprint.

2. How will you use each of the professional competencies to drive

the relationships that you have with stakeholders? (Please
discuss each competency and how it will affect at least one
group of stakeholders.)

Interpersonal Awareness: This means being aware not just of others

around you, but also of how your words and actions might affect them,
or are affecting them, and conducting yourself accordingly.
Stakeholder: I think that this is the most important to remember
when speaking with the parents of students. Each student is
someones child, not just a kid in your class, and when speaking with
parents it is crucial to remember that and be aware of the effects or
potential effects of your words and attitude toward that parents child.

Suspending Judgment: This means pausing to reflect before making

any assumptions or judgments of others, because you likely do not
have all the information about a situation or person necessary to fully
understand the reasons behind his or her actions.
Stakeholder: I think that this is important to remember when dealing
with colleagues. In a larger school, which is the type of environment I
would prefer to work in, teachers need to work together and coordinate
their classes to ensure that all sections of any given class are on the
same page, and it may be frustrating to work with colleagues who
have a different method of doing things than I would. But instead of
becoming frustrated, I can suspend judgment, and learn from them.

Asset Based Thinking: This mean focusing on a persons assets and

abilities, rather than on a persons shortcomings, and using those
assets to achieve success and build confidence.
Stakeholder: I think this is very important to remember when
teaching students. Not all students will think the same way, or have
the same strengths and abilities. As a teacher, I need to be able to
focus on each students assets and help them see their assets as well,
so that together we can build upon their strengths to reach our goals.

Locus of Control: This means focusing on those things we can

control, and relinquishing worries about what is out of our control.
Stakeholder: I think this is important to remember when working with
administrators, who control much more than I will as a teacher. There
will be things that I might disagree with that are out of my control,
such as district policies, but if I spend time and energy stressing about
those things, I will likely burn out quickly. Instead, I can focus on what I
can control within my own classroom and do my best within that locus
of control.

3. Identify one (or two) CRT disposition(s) and discuss your

personal growth within these areas:

Sociocultural consciousness: I think I have grown a lot in my

sociocultural consciousness over the past year. I have come to realize
that my archetypes and biases are just thosearchetypes and biases,
not right and wrong. Although I do believe in right and wrong, I have
learned to see the difference between right vs. wrong and my way vs.
others ways.

Affirming attitude toward difference: Similar to how I have grown

in sociocultural consciousness is how I have grown in my affirming
attitude toward difference. Rather than seeing differences a negative,
and anything different from how I do things as a wrong way to do
things, I now see differences simply as differences (or I am learning to,
at least). This will help me so much as a teacher, particularly in giving
me more patience when students act differently than I expect them to.
Responsibility and capacity to be culturally responsive: I have
learned so much about how I, as a teacher, will have a responsibility to
be culturally responsive. It really is a responsibility, in a day and age
where there is so much cultural diversity in the schools that I will be
working in. I need to be able to respond to that, and make my content
accessible and relevant to each of my students. Because I realize my
responsibility to be culturally responsive, I have more easily been able
to increase my capacity to do so as well.

4. What will culturally responsive teaching look like in your

classroom? Review the principles of CRT and discuss how you
will embody at least one of these in your teaching.

Academic Achievement: Hernandez described this principle of CRT

as the teachers ability to create opportunities in the classroom that
aid al students in developing as learners to achieve academic success
(Hernandez, et al, 2013). In other words, culturally responsive teaching
still needs to be effective content teaching. The goal is still for students
to achieve academic success. More importantly, the goal is for every
student, even those from diverse cultures, to achieve success.
Strategy: A few ways I can embody this in my teaching is to use
visual representations and other methods of teaching to reach out to
students who may learn or understand things differently. In math,
modeling is incredibly useful, and will make the content more
accessible to students from various backgrounds.

Cultural Competence: In addition to becoming academically

competent, students should be culturally competent. This is another
goal or principle of CRT: to help students maintain culturally integrity
and develop their own identity, unifying their cultural at-home identity
and their academic at-school identity.
Strategy: I think the disconnect between school math and real life
math causes a disconnect between students academic and home
identities. Something I can do to mitigate that and embody cultural
competence in my teaching is provide relevant real-life examples of
how my content could be used outside the classroom in ways that the
students are interested in and might actually encounter.

Critical Consciousness: This principle of CRT deals with the ability to

critique and critically examine culture, both a students own culture
and cultures the student may not be as familiar with, to observe social
inequalities and find ways to make a meaningful difference.
Strategy: As a math teacher, I can easily incorporate real-life
problems, especially dealing with statistics, economics, and finances,
that would encourage my students to increase their awareness of their
world and the world around them and develop their critical
consciousness.

References:
Hernandez, C. c., Morales, A., & Shroyer, M. (2013). The development
of a model of culturally responsive science and mathematics
teaching. Cultural Studies Of Science Education, 8(4), 803-820.

Underwood, J., & Webb, D. (2006). School law for teacher: Concepts
and applications. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education,
Inc.