Self-reflection aims to help teachers improve their teaching and learn more about how professional practices affect student and teacher learning. Establishing a professional growth plan that either develops or hones professional practices and leadership abilities can help achieve professional aims. In order to successfully develop a professional growth plan, a group of colleagues and I chose to be in an SEL (social-emotional learning) group and were given the task of building trust within the department (EC – Early Learning) and how to make things better for future academic years. We had many ideas at the beginning of this academic year and were full of energy, but unfortunately, the lack of time to meet, and lack of motivation, inability to meet the team on a regular basis due to different schedules we all had made it extremely hard to accomplish everything we originally wanted.
Nevertheless, we conducted a small-scale survey of our co-workers and received essential data. Although it should be noted it was not possible to collect profound and complete answers for each question. There are no definite reasons for such results, but my professional prediction implies that the department did not trust to respond with confidence and was afraid their answer would get them in trouble despite the confirmed anonymity.
Most of the responses we did receive were very similar peers seemed to feel overwhelmed, were not treated as professionals, were not given autonomy to make decisions within their classrooms, and wanted more time to work on lesson plans or meet their teams for planning, feedback, and discuss upcoming events and due dates. The project was compelling and prompted me to consider introducing an improved version of the survey with a focus on 2-3 items to guarantee commitment and notoriety of answers. Therefore, I hope to develop and conduct the project in the year PGP.