InTasc #9
The teacher engages in ongoing professional learning and uses evidence to continually evaluate his/her practice, particularly the effects of his/her choices and actions on others (learners, families, other professionals, and the community), and adapts practice to meet the needs of each learner.
Inclusive Teaching Practices Annotated Bibliography
This artifact is part of an annotated bibliography on inclusive teaching practices. Each member of a group was responsible for selecting one article to synthesis, analyze, and evaluate. This article was on differentiating math tasks while maintaining cognitive demand and still addressing the underlying math concept being assessed. It provides a framework for designing differentiation that maintains those aspects and gives specific examples for a sample math task.
This artifact is an example of engaging in ongoing professional learning and using evidence to continually evaluate the teacher’s practice, particularly the effects of their choices and actions on learners and adapting to meet the needs of each learner. By seeking practitioner articles, teachers can continually develop professionally and use evidence to evaluate their own practice. In this case, evaluating their own differentiation using the framework provided in the article to check if they are properly maintaining cognitive demand. This article in particular leads teachers to be reflective about how their actions differentiating instruction may be unintentionally harming students' opportunities to learn. By doing so, they are better able to adapt to the needs of their students in ways that do not hinder their engagement with productive struggle.
This article challenged me to be more critical of my own differentiation and to ensure that my lessons are still providing students with an appropriate level of productive struggle. It is part of an ongoing effort to be up to date with and apply current literature that enhances my knowledge of educational issues and practices. Differentiation has been a major topic in all content areas for years now and has become widely known by educators, but it is important still to keep up with current discourse on best practices.
Daily Reflection – March 18, 2026
This artifact is a daily reflection from March 18, 2026, during my student teaching placement in a 6th grade math classroom. I was implementing a lesson introducing lines of symmetry of regular polygons and my cooperating teacher had some feedback for me after first period. The feedback centered around how to lead the lesson and included suggestions for when to go over some of the problems with the class, to put more emphasis on the paper folding manipulatives for the lesson, to get them started looking for patterns to develop a rule for the number of lines of symmetry earlier in the lesson, and when to take away the manipulatives so that students would have to generalize that rule for a new problem rather than use the manipulative again.
This reflection shows how a teacher can engage in ongoing professional learning and continually evaluate their practice by collaborating with colleagues and revising classroom practice based on feedback. The idea of using the mirrors in the lesson to find lines of symmetry came from my cooperating teacher. This combined with the paper folding I had originally planned on doing made the lesson more accessible through multiple means of representation and action. This came about through collaborating with my cooperating teacher, and her additional feedback further improved the lesson.
I value the feedback and collaboration of my colleagues, especially veteran teachers whose teaching practices I try to emulate. I may find myself in rooms where I have had further preparatory training than some, but I am still the most novice teacher. Being willing to receive feedback or collaborate with others is an important quality for any teacher, but especially teachers that are new to the profession and just getting started. Being an island makes planning and teaching more challenging and benefits neither the teacher who does not collaborate nor their colleagues.
Parent Teacher Conference Notes, April 16, 2026
These are notes on a parent teacher conference that took place with the family of a 6th grade student who has been on the receiving end of bullying from a group of students. The student is an English Language Learner (ELL) with very limited English proficiency, and the group of students also speak her native language which can make it difficult to monitor what is being said. The students faced consequences before but because of the language barrier and the student’s hesitancy to come forward again, the behavior was able to continue. Previously, this student and two of the students who had been bullying her were placed near each other in the room so that it would be more convenient for the ELL specialist to provide services to all of them on days when she is present. After we became aware of the situation, we changed that seating arrangement.
This artifact relates to continually evaluating practice, particularly the effects of choices and actions on others, including learners, families, and the community, and adapting practice to meet the needs of each learner. In this case, we needed to act on new information given to us, first by administrators and then by the student and her family, to change our seating practices for a group of students in our classroom because of the effects on one student, her family, and ultimately the larger community because of the tension that was being created between the families. This change was to adapt to the needs of each student, including the two other ELLs, to minimize their negative behavior.
It is paramount that students feel safe at school, and this must be ensured before a student is able to learn and thrive in the school environment. It is also essential to the social development of students that they feel safe in the classroom. Given the constraints of the classroom and the students’ schedules, the best course of action was to separate them within the room.