This year I learned a lot about self-regulation and how important it is to have those skills to regulate emotions. I have to regulate my emotions and I think modeling those skills is beneficial for my students to see the skills they are learning being used. I think all teachers should learn how they can use their self-regulation skills with their class. If they like to stretch and do yoga to regulate, they can do that with their class. I had never thought about it before, but it is a skill I have started using and think all teachers need to learn and practice.
Proactive correction is something I have worked on implementing as well. I had done this occasionally, but now I am doing it constantly in my classroom. I think all teachers should work at proactive correction more because it clearly lays out expectations for students. I find my students do much better we have done practice correction before an activity. I knew my students had been told what was expected of them and I would remind them sometimes, but it has really helped my students who were more frequent to have an outburst be more successful with meeting expected behaviors. I think the proactive correction helped to have the routine be more concrete and have there be fewer outburst since expectations were clear.
I learned that asking the students what they wanted and working to tailor class activities towards their interests significantly improved their focus when working on sedimentary activities. I think having that collaboration with my students was important and they were able to see that I found their interests important. It helped to build our relationships and we had more class discussions when we were doing a task that involved their personal interests.
I love to share successful supports in weekly meetings with my co-teachers or just throughout the day. I found that my other staff members enjoyed talking about out shared successes we've had and being proud of how our students are progressing.
I have had the ability to email my parents with positive updates throughout the year when their children were succeeding. It was great to get to build those positive relationships and see how proud we all were of the progress the students have made. I love being able to share good news especially to parents who have a child that has been struggling. I think those are some of the biggest wins when we start to see those interventions working and the student learning. I simply love being able to share successes with parents.
I think being able to email parents about the success of their children has been effective so far when it comes to communicating. I think starting a monthly sheet that send home with the big things I noticed throughout the month might be a better way to make sure I am giving consistent updates to parents about their child's success. I think emails are a great way to give those small updates, and lets the parents know how their child is doing. I think having a system where I send an email to two parents a night during the week and putting a check mark next to the child's name would be a way to make it so I could ensure all parents are receiving consistent updates about their child.