Bernice Garcia

Standard 5.b: Professional Development, Partnerships and

Advocacy; Principle #9 Reflective Practitioner, Continued
Professional Growth; Principle #10 Fostering Collaborative
Relationships to Support Student Learning
Candidates take advantage of professional growth
opportunities and demonstrate the ability to build
partnerships with colleagues and students families, serve as
community resources, and advocate for ELLs.
(3) They collaborate with school staff to provide educational
opportunities for ELLs and advocate for appropriate
instruction and assessment by sharing their knowledge
of ELLs with their general-education and content-area colleagues and
with the community. Candidates engage in collaborative teaching in
general education, content-area, special education, and gifted
classrooms.
For standard 5.b, advocacy and collaboration I picked an email
from a parent and I as an artifact. This was a former parent from my
class last year. This parent and I used emails as a communication
because at the moment she was a single mother that worked a 12-hour
shift.
Her son, C is a very bright boy. However, he has challenging
behavior that makes the classroom environment very hard to teach
and for students to learn in. When I realized what was going on with C,
I spoke to his formal teacher. She discussed with me certain strategies
she used in the classroom but told me that they did not work very well.
Therefore, I decided to observe Cs behavior for a few weeks and wrote
many notes on his behaviors the positives and negatives. I then
decided to have a meeting with his mother and the school dean. In this

meeting I came up with the idea of emailing his mother every Friday.
The email on Fridays included Cs positive behavior and/or academic
and Cs negative behavior and/or academic. The agreement was for his
mother to discuss with him the information in the email. The goal every
week was for the positives to overweight the negatives. This worked
out very well throughout the academic school year.
The reason I decided to email this parent weekly was because I
notice that Cs only weakness was his mother. He cared for his mother
deeply and truly believed he was the man of the household.
Therefore, the only person he did not want to upset or disappoint was
his mother. However, it was impossible for the mother to come
regularly to school or to pick up her cellphone because of her job. This
made me think out-side the box, I knew the key was to have
communication with the mother. By the end of the year C and his
mother realized that he didnt only have his mother who cared but also
a teacher.