Running head: LOOKING FORWARD

Assignment 2 Looking Forward

Kevin Eubanks
National University

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for

TED 690Capstone Course
Carol Shepherd, Ed.D.

Running head: LOOKING FORWARD

Abstract
The goal of this paper is to take a closer look at the professional
development plan and timeline for accomplishing this plan for a high school
English-Language Arts teacher. The plan examines the goals of this teacher
to improve in the classroom over the next five years and categorizes what
training is planned to attend at what times over those next five years. At the
end of the paper is a rationale for the artifacts that were included in this
teachers PDQP that focus on professional development.

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Professional Development
Teaching is not a profession in which a person can sit back and simply
say, I know everything that I need to know. Imagine a teacher who was
hired 20 years ago, as most schools have on their employee roster. That
teacher started in 1995, long before Common Core, ubiquitous Internet, WiFi, personal electronic devices, and even something as simple as PowerPoint.
Very few teachers had desktop computers at that time and keeping a paper
gradebook was the norm. Imagine that teacher today simply satisfied with
his knowledge, going about teaching his class the exact same way he did 20
years prior. It clearly would not work. Thus is the key to teaching constant
adjustment and education to keep up with the times.
The following is my plan to adjust and educate myself to keep up with
the times. Despite being a teacher for only three years, I am already seeing
things adjust in my own classroom, school, district, and state that I need to
keep up with in order to ensure my own success in educating others.
Therefore, this plan will identify the professional development that I look to
engage in over the next five years. While this plan will likely adjust as the
teaching environment changes over the next half-decade, that is simply a
sign of continuing to adjust to keep up with what is happening in the
education landscape of California.
In order to develop this plan, I used Constantinos (2009) plan to
identify my personal goals, look at options to fulfill those goals, and then
design a plan to accomplish these goals (pg. 20). My goal as a teacher in this

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realm is twofold: (1) Become as educated as I can in order to teach my

students to the best of my ability, and (2) Become certified in as many areas
as I can to aid me in my first goal as well as add justification and legitimacy
to my teaching endeavors. This five-year plan will hopefully enable me to
accomplish both of those goals.
The Five-Year Plan
As far as I am able to see, the next five years of my career are fairly
locked up. While anything can change at any point, I enjoy teaching at my
school, I enjoy teaching the level of students that I teach, and even though
something might come up that would force me from one school to the next,
what I teach and the type of student I teach will not. Bakersfield is a multicultural city with a large population of Hispanic and Caucasian students but
also a significant number of African-American students as well as students
from the Middle East and India. So, as a Caucasian man, I know that I need to
continue to educate myself on teaching in a multi-cultural classroom. I also
understand my need to effectively teach journalism since I teach that
subject, as well as teaching writing effectively, since I have a strong belief
that just about everyone is a professional writer in their careers and the
better a person can write, the better their careers will be.
With that in mind, I focused on these exact areas when assembling my
professional development plan. I wanted to ensure that I could teach all
students no matter of cultural background effectively, I wanted to reach the
top of journalism education in my field, and I wanted to enhance my teaching

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as a writer. In doing so, I developed the following professional development

plan:

Timeline
2015
Year 1
2016
Year 2
2017

Professional Goal
Take the online course Building
Cultural Competency to Improve
Instruction and Student
Achievement for credit.
Become a Master Journalism
Educator through the Journalism
Education Association.
Become a National Board Certified
teacher.

Year 3-5
2018
Year 4
2019

Take the online course Why We

Argue: The Art of Oral and Written
Argument for credit.
Attend San Joaquin Valley Writing
Project Summer Institute.

Year 5

The first step in my professional development is to improve my ability

to teach in a multi-cultural setting. The online course Building Cultural
Competency to Improve Instruction and Student Achievement will not only
give me university credit, but it will also give me knowledge to further my
abilities with the mixed nature within my classroom. According to the
Advancement Courses (n.d.a) Web site, The course is designed to provide

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the teacher with the tools necessary to understand how to teach with
cultural competence, so that all students are actively supported in the
classroom. Since this is one of my major goals within my classroom on a
daily basis, the more training on this topic the better, and this is the first big
step toward achieving that goal.
Since I also teach journalism, I want to reach the pinnacle of that
teaching profession as well, so in the second year of this plan, I will pursue
becoming a Master Journalism Educator through the Journalism Education
Association. This is an exam process to earn this title and I am current one
step away from the classification of being a Certified Journalism Educator.
But the classes and training leading to becoming a Master Journalism
Educator will take me to the next level in teaching my students the art of
journalism. According to the JEA (n.d.) Web site, a Master Journalism Educator
can design or adapt journalism programs to meet specific needs and to
serve as a spokesman representing journalism teachers/advisers on the
local, state and national levels. This type of responsibility is my goal as an
educator and I look forward to achieving it when taking this extensive
coursework and exam.
In my third through fifth years, I want to develop into the top of my
profession by becoming nationally board certified. While some teachers I
have spoken to do not believe in the importance of being board certified, I
disagree. I like the idea of having the certification that allows me to be
distinguished as being at the top of my field, no matter the hard work that

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might be necessary. It might be a lot of work, but being distinguished as

an accomplished, effective teacher who has met the highest standards in the
profession (National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, n.d.) not
only allows me to learn a tremendous amount teaching but also gives me
legitimacy in everything that I am trying to accomplish as a professional in
the classroom.
While the process of becoming nationally board certified will likely take
a lot of time and energy, the fourth year of my professional development will
be a somewhat smaller course focusing on writing. To be honest, if I have
time to fit this online course in sooner to my professional development, I will,
because I see huge benefits that could be gained from taking this course
immediately. The course is titled Why We Argue: Teaching the Art of Oral
and Written Argument, and it seeks to answer the problem that I have in my
own classroom daily. I can teach the structure of writing, but I cannot make
students develop reasons to support their arguments. The first line from the
Advancement Courses (n.d.b) Web site explaining the course asks, How
many times have you heard a student say because or use subjective
reasoning when asked to support an argument? My answer to that is every
day and I want to learn how to make it stop. This class, for university credit,
will allow me to find a way to end this circle in my classroom and help
students write arguments more effectively.
To complete my five-year plan, I want to attend the San Joaquin Valley
Writing Project (SJVWP) Summer Institute. This is an intensive training that

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meets in Fresno on six different occasions for a total of 19 days for teachers
who want to become experts in writing instruction. This is a highly
competitive institute so I figure that once I am nearing the finish of the
national board certification and have been in the classroom for seven years
with a masters degree, my chances of being accepted will improve. The
major takeaway from this Summer Institute that is appealing to me is
becoming a Teacher Leader (TL) who often become leaders at their school
sites in writing instruction, (SJVWP, n.d.). That would be the ideal finish to a
five-year professional development plan: Learn how to teach a multi-cultural
classroom better, reach the pinnacle of journalism teaching and EnglishLanguage Arts certification, learn to help students write arguments better,
and finally become a leader of teaching writing at my school.
Sharing the Plan
At my school and district, I am bundled into several different
Professional Learning Communities (PLC). To begin with, I sit on the eightperson ninth-grade English PLC. In addition, I am also on a two-person ninthgrade GATE English PLC as well as a district-wide journalism PLC. Within the
PLC, we are expected to share ideas for growth on a regular basis and it is
within the PLC that I will share my professional development plan and
hopefully encourage others to join me on my journey. While I do not expect
other teachers to be as excited as I am in being nationally board certified, I
do expect others to want to take an online course that will help students
write arguments better. And of course, different teachers will have different

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enthusiasm. But best of all, my school has money to spend for professional
development and my hope is that if enough teachers are interested in
learning like I am that the school will step in and fund some of these projects,
taking the burden off of me personally.
Domain F Artifact Justification
For Domain F of my Professional Development Quest Portfolio (PDQP), I
have selected four artifacts, one of which is this paper. A PDQP needs to have
structure and within Domain F, nothing builds structure better than a
background and justification for my five-year professional development plan.
This plan will be included and featured in the PDQP as the first of my four
artifacts.
The second artifact for Domain F will be from a professional
development that I attended a couple of months ago by Rick Morris. While
Morris taught me so much in terms of classroom management and
organization, the artifact is one of the many things that I implemented into
my classroom right away. This is a simple gradesheet that I use as my dayto-day tracking of how students are doing at a glance. This sheet simply has
a column for names and columns for the days of the week. When students do
something well, they get a quick check. When they do something
outstanding, they get a star. When students disrupt class or otherwise fail to
meet classroom expectations, they get an X. Thats it. The beauty of the
sheet is when the week is over, I can look at each student in one second and
know how they are doing. If a student has X after X, it is time for me to

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intervene. If there are lots of checks and stars, I need to encourage that
student to continue. If there is blank after blank, I need to find ways to get
this student involved. It is so simple, but also so effective. And in the end,
Domain F expects teachers to take responsibility for student academic
learning outcomes, (CTC, n.d., pg. 17) and that is exactly what this artifact
does.
My third artifact is the professional development calendar for my
school district, the Kern High School District. Being the largest high school
district in the state, the KHSD is able to provide plenty of professional
development opportunities for teachers each and every year. The calendar
that is currently available on the KHSD Web site is outdated, but I will use it
as an example of what is available every year since it is similar from year to
year with some things added and some taken away. I am using the artifact to
show that while I have highlighted five professional development
opportunities in my plan above, I will also use the extensive calendar of
professional development through my school district to continue my
education even further. This is backed up in TPE 13: Teachers improve
their teaching practices by soliciting feedback and engaging in cycles of
planning, teaching, reflecting, discerning problems, and applying new
strategies, (CTC, n.d., pg. 17). I will improve my teaching by doing all of
those things when attending professional development courses.
Finally, my final artifact will be a review of the article The Use of
Training Days: Finding Time for Teachers Professional Development,

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originally printed in the journal Educational Research in 2013. The basis of

the article is that professional development is important, but finding time for
it hurts educators. But in some places around the world, students are left
home so teachers can find time for the professional development, and even
when those days are available anywhere in the world, the time is not used
wisely. The article finds that time can be found for professional development
and used wisely to find production from teachers. This fits as an artifact for
me because my only concern with my professional development plan is
finding time to complete it. If my school would take time with inservice days
and other appropriate hours throughout the year, I could complete this
important professional development during my work time, helping me be
more productive for my school.

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References
Advancement Courses. (n.d.a). Building cultural competency to improve
instruction and student achievement. Retrieved July 16, 2015 from
http://www.advancementcourses.com/courses/at-riskstudents/building-cultural-competency-to-improve-instruction-andstudent-achievement/
Advancement Courses. (n.d.b). Why we argue: Teaching the art of oral and
written argument. Retrieved July 16, 2015 from
http://www.advancementcourses.com/courses/english-languagearts/why-we-argue-taching-the-art-of-oral-and-written-argument/
Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC). (2013). California teaching performance
expectations.
Constantino, P., & Lorenzo, M. (2009). Developing a professional teaching
portfolio: A guide for success (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Allyn
& Bacon/Pearson.
JEA. (n.d.). Master journalism educator. Retrieved July 16, 2015 from
http://jea.org/certification/master-journalism-educator/
National Board of Professional Teaching Standards (n.d.). Why certify?
Retrieved July 16, 2015 from http://boardcertifiedteachers.org/aboutcertification/why-certify
San Joaquin Valley Writing Project (SJVWP). (n.d.). Summer institute.
Retrieved July 16, 2015 from http://sjvwp.org/summer-institute/