KELLY DUNHAM

JUNE 2014
200 HOUR INTERNSHIP
CUMULATIVE HOURS 200
ELCC STANDARD

MAJOR ACTIVITIES

STANDARD 1

Met with Summer School principals and teachers

Read SLO information
Read APPR information
Home visit for high absenteeism student
Held grade level RTI meetings
Collaboration with Teacher and Home-to-School Coordinator
for PTO details and information
Met with teachers for testing administration planning
meeting

STANDARD 2

STANDARD 3
STANDARD 4

Attended domestic violence prevention workshop

STANDARD 5

Discipline
Attended faculty meeting
Collaboration with supervisor in managing teacher/aide
schedules
Worked with Guidance Counselor and principal to finalize
testing administration change details

STANDARD 6
STANDARD 7

REFLECTION / COMMENTS:
Testing Administration
Testing day has been reported by teachers and the Guidance Counselor as
confusing and with problem areas. After meeting with administration and the
Guidance Counselor last month in understanding the process and concerns, I
proposed to meet with Special Education Teachers in order to devise an
improvement plan. Pulling in the key players proved very useful as they had great

insight into improvement ideas. They even initiated taking on more responsibility
on testing day in order to make their suggestions work. Empowering the teachers
can be a very powerful tool!
Faculty Meetings
Attending faculty meetings is something I have never done consistently before my
internship. I have come to realize that this collaboration and professional
development time is extremely productive and is an excellent way to stay
connected with staff, faculty and administration. With common collaboration time
being so rare, I realize that these opportunities are essential for all stakeholders and
should be maximized. Our district utilizes teachers sharing with teachers as it
appears to be a very effective model. It is reported by our Curriculum Coordinator
that these types of professional development opportunities leads to greater buy-in,
attention, time/effort investment and interest. Picking up on a concept like this in
any school could really help in how to best provide professional development so that
it is as effective as possible.
RTI
An end of the year RTI meeting appeared to be a nice way of reviewing overall
student data for the year with final benchmarks. We were also able to discuss the
overall process and plans of passing RTI folders on to next years teachers. Despite
the challenges of holding teachers accountable to an RTI system, a formal process is
starting to show its effectiveness. Common language has been used at each
meeting and appears to be helping teachers to understand the RTI, Child Study
Team, CSE process in alignment. All of the teachers that I have been working with
received RTI training a few years ago which I was not a part of. They also were part
of the planning teams in developing the districts tiers and policies. Jumping into
this project I assumed that all were well versed so I initiated receiving my own
training and understanding of what had been put in place. I had no idea that
teachers did not even remember what had been developed or implemented and
that they were really not up to date on the overall RTI process. This experience has
taught me that professional development, even as a refresher, is very important.
The survey that assisted in understanding the needs could have been improved by
asking a simple question as to the teachers comfort level on understanding the RTI
process.