Teacher Faculty meeting - Essay Example

English Teacher Faculty Meeting Competency and quality of education system is one of the key factors ensuring development of the nation, training of professional of high level that would be able to contribute to well-being of the country. Elementary schools, in their turn, play an important role in education system as they are responsible for forming a firm foundation for further skills and knowledge acquisition in children, giving them a primary set of knowledge. Thus, elementary schooling system has to be well-organized, and teachers should work in cooperation and accord to fulfill their duties properly.
Keeping this in mind, I attended a teacher faculty meeting taking place in Jonas Salk Elementary School on October 16, 2014. The meeting was organized for kindergarten teachers working in this school. There were four professional female teachers: Mrs. Thompson, Mrs. Swift, Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Jones. The meeting was initiated and organized by Mrs. Swift who considered it to be necessary to discuss and solve several issues concerning professional activity. Participants gathered to discuss relevant issues and challenges they faced.
First of all, a lot of attention was given to the issue of special needs of random children and meeting them. General consent was reached in this point, as all the teachers stressed the importance of establishing and developing learning centers that would work as additional educational venues assisting children in their special needs. Moreover, teachers debated on setting unified one-level curriculum or multiple level curriculum for these centers. Although opinions ran 50:50 at first, the teachers eventually agreed upon multiple level curriculum as Mrs. Jones provided a reasonable argument. The argument was that a curriculum including several levels would enable adjusting to children’s needs more accurately, taking their level of cognitive and psychological development as well as their background and interests into account.
Emphasis was also made on the problem of working with newly admitted Spanish children who have very poor English skills. The teachers discussed ways to approach such children with whom they aren’t able to communicate. As such children need to be taught equally, yet require special approach, the teachers made an attempt to solve a problem and develop a set of methods. For instance, it was suggested to organize a course of qualification improvement and training including Spanish classes for teachers. Furthermore, as one of the teachers, Mrs. Jackson, proved to have some primary language skills in Spanish, she suggested to form a “preparation” group for Spanish children where their English skills would be improved to the level that would allow other teachers to proceed with teaching without serious difficulties in communication. Both ideas – preparatory group and language training – were met warmly at the meeting and, probably, will be applied in practice in the future.
Finally, the skills and disciplines children should be taught more in the first grade were discussed. All teachers participated actively in this discussion, stating that children should be given more space for developing their potential and talents and thus the curriculum shouldn’t be overloaded and should be fused with more classes of arts, music etc.
To my thinking, the meeting was held in the friendly atmosphere and communication went on free-and-easy. The results obtained in the meeting were decided to be applied in lessons, thus there’re reasonable grounds to consider the meeting successful and valuable for its participants (and, hopefully, for children in the further educational process). Read More