Biography
Cohort: 2025
Credential: Multiple Subject
Degrees: BA in Sociology; Master of Arts in Teaching
Currently Teaching: Jean Parker Elementary School, Second Grade
Jean Parker Elementary School
Question: What attracted you to Jean Parker? How did you end up there?
Sophia: I put my application out in the end of May, and the next day got an email from the principal of Jean Parker. I was student teaching at Rosa Parks and the Jean Parker principal reached out to her and asked about me as a student teacher and stuff. The Rosa Parks principal told me that Jean Parker’s a great school with a great principal. She said, “If you get offered the job, I would take it.” So I had a meeting with Jean Parker’s principal to kind of get to know the school.
The school has four big values that are at the bottom of the principal’s email. They’re at the foundation of everything we do: relationships, joy, solidarity and communication. That was really big to me. The principal said, we are always grounded in these values, and these are some of the most important things to us. I thought, that’s so cool that instead of just a huge mission statement with language maybe the everyday person wouldn’t know or understand in an academic context, this was written for students and their families. It was really easy to digest. And I really liked that. So we got along and she asked me to do an interview.
They asked me to bring two pictures to the interview, one that showed my behavior management, kind of how I work with kids and my experience. The other picture depicted an academic challenge I’ve had, or how to work with diverse learners. It was interesting looking through my own camera roll to try and figure out how to explain these things through a photo. I enjoyed that. The school has a huge percentage of English language learners and newcomers. In my IDP [Individual Development Plan], I wrote about how I wanted to get stronger with working with English language learners. So I talked about that in my interview.
The school is really small, and I grew up going to a really small school. The one thing I really valued was community and feeling like everyone knew each other and people really care about each other. Just being there for that interview, I really got to see that. Then they offered me the job right after the interview and I was like, yep, thank you, I will take that. And I’m really happy. I love the school and it’s super small. I have 13 kids in my class. It’s been great.
I love this one thing the school does, that I really think is super cool as a part of our Tier One supports for students. We have implemented activities at recess that are planned. So for example, on Wednesdays there’s a craft corner, or there’s some game being played. The principal and the team that developed the plans said it’s a way to help with creating relationships and a Tier One support of managing behaviors. Because if there’s things that are planned and there’s a lot of adults out there, then there are less likely to be incidents and stuff like that. I’d never seen planning recess time like that. I really like that.
Transitioning from Fifth Year to Full-time Teaching
Question: How has it been transitioning from student teaching to your own classroom? Did you get everything you needed in student teaching?
Sophia: The four solo weeks in student teaching really helped prepare me to plan continuously, as well as at the end of the day. It’s not like you have one lesson and then you can just delete everything. You have to start prepping for tomorrow and printing stuff and and doing all of those things. So the solo weeks helped prepare me for having that mentality, that it’s not just you’ve done the lesson and then it’s done forever; you’re building off of it every day. In student teaching we didn’t cover much about communicating with parents or how to refer students. You need to communicate with the parents, especially if you’re noticing something is wrong. You also need to communicate if a student needs to be referred, such as going to speech or something like that. I think having the vocabulary and the knowledge of who to talk to and how to bring that up is useful. I had a student in my class that I definitely saw some concerns regarding speech and knew that they might need to see a speech pathologist. But when I reached out, the speech pathologist asked, “What are the things you’re recognizing?” And I didn’t quite have the language for that.
Being a mandated reporter for CPS reporting is also new. You need to have the mental capacity to hear about things and then report them. That’s been hard. There’s many, many, many things that you have to think about as a teacher. The hardest part, honestly, was the beginning of the school year when you’re told to plan your procedures and routines. When you haven’t been a teacher before, you don’t know your procedures and routines. It would be helpful to at least have an idea of some things that you want to start the year off with. You should have some call and responses ready. You should know how you want your kids to come into the room and start the day, how you want them to stand up out of their desk and go and get something. All these things I had never really thought about and had just seen happen in the classroom in student teaching. But writing out my exact routines and procedures was really hard at the beginning of the year because I’ve never taught on my own, so I didn’t know what I wanted in that way.
Curriculum
Question: Do you have a mentor that you’re partnered up with at Jean Parker?
Sophia: Yes, I work with the instructional coach. It’s a super small school, so I don’t have a grade level team. It’s just me as the second grade teacher, which has been a little challenging, especially since my student teaching mentor teacher wasn’t using the curriculum, though it was the same grade. If you don’t have a grade level team, then it’s just on me to to figure out all of it. I do think it’s hard for a program because teaching programs can’t anticipate where everyone’s going to teach. So it’s not like you could say, here’s the framework, learn it. I wish my past self looked or thought more about the big picture of the curriculum, instead of jumping right into lesson one and not thinking ahead. Like, I can have everything prepared for lesson one through five, but then what do I want them to know at the very end? I think that it’s been hard to do, to think of the big picture when I’m so focused on just getting everything done.
Question: I understand your Master’s classes focused on curriculum. Did you find that helpful?
Sophia: Before the Master’s classes, the literacy classes were helpful because they really showed us how to administer things like reading exams and what to look for. So those were really helpful. And they also talked a little bit about the curriculum as well. A lot of the Master’s classes focused on doing something brand new, as in, if you could create anything you want, what would it look like? Which was definitely cool and gave us a lot of inspiration and excitement about being a teacher. But I think in reality, for a lot of schools, that’s not really the case—they want you to follow the curriculum very closely. So I wish there was a little bit more guidance about how to follow a curriculum instead of just critiquing the current curriculum.
We did look at the state standards, but it was just unpacking them or making something new with them. Which I definitely don’t think is a waste of time or anything because it was exciting and it got us really excited about teaching in general. But I think it would have been also beneficial to look at the standards and then look at any curriculum at a week at a glance and say, these are all the concepts that you need to teach this week. The standards are being supported by this work, but the standards aren’t there in that curriculum. It would help to look more intentionally at what’s expected of you instead of the broad standard. For example, how in second grade, they need to know this type of phonological pattern or things like that, then basing a lesson plan off of a skill instead of a standard.
Teaching Priorities
Question: Now that you have your own classroom, what are some of the most important things you demonstrate to your students?
Sophia: One thing that was always said in all my classes was about offering students windows and mirrors into their lives in the classroom. That’s something that’s really important to me, giving space and making space for students to see themselves and their culture and the different identities that they have, and be able to resonate with that and share it with people. I want them to learn about a bunch of different types of cultures and different family structures or abilities or race, gender, all those things. I think school is one of the places that kids really have that opportunity, to have a safe space for them to ask questions and to see different realities, as well as have their own depicted in a way that is safe and nurturing.
A lot of them, especially the younger kids, second graders, they have a lot of questions that might come across as, I wouldn’t say, unkind, but maybe a little ignorant, because they’re young and they don’t know, and they ask questions because they’re very curious. So you can have, for example, a read aloud or an activity to answer questions with examples and evidence and a conversation which you wouldn’t really be able to have with just a kid walking down the street. It’s such a great opportunity that the educational space offers, as well as just learning from each other. Even if it’s learning how to deal with someone who says something unkind to you, how do you accept that and then restore that? It’s life lessons. Even today we had a huge conversation about sportsmanship and how to lose a game and how to win a game in a way that in another setting might have just been dismissed as like, oh, don’t be a sore loser or don’t brag. But we really had an in-depth conversation about it, and students asked questions and we were able to look at it through that lens, which I think is really, really important.
Sometimes kids think, why do I need to learn this? This isn’t important. But you need a baseline to help them know what might be important and what can inspire their dreams. We’re doing a science unit right now. We’re looking at what is a scientist, who is a scientist and so on. The first thing is to ask them to draw a scientist, and it’s very broad. You just ask them to draw it and everyone draws something different or something similar. A lot of them drew a man with crazy hair and goggles. Then we read a story called Ada Twist, Scientist. It’s a story of a young Black girl and how she builds things and works with chemicals and is a scientist. At the end of the book I asked them, did anyone draw her as a scientist? And they all were like, no. So we had a whole conversation about how scientists can look and be different things. One student asked, then why do they all look the same? Why is Albert Einstein the only scientist I know? So we had a whole conversation about how usually white straight men were the ones who are represented and how there was people behind the scenes that were people of color and women that were contributing to the scientific community. That was a conversation I did not anticipate having with my second graders, but they really were curious and wanted to know, why don’t I see anyone that looks like me? So they were able to then draw another scientist, and a lot of them drew themselves, which made me really happy.
I have unexpected conversations with my students. When students are at this age, they kind of just say whatever they’re thinking. So a lot of times I’m not anticipating a certain conversation. I think about the the first day of school. I was introducing myself and I was reciting the members of my family and I used the word stepdad because I have a stepdad, and a lot of them were like, huh? I had never had that happen to me where people didn’t know what divorced parents were or didn’t know what a stepparent was. I had to take that opportunity to then explain all different types of families. I briefly talked about it and then later we did a whole read aloud about different types of families. During the read aloud, when the word divorce came up, they all were like, that’s you, Miss Sophia. [laughs]. They then did an activity for Back to School night that started with, “My family is different because…” and a lot of them wrote about how they speak a different language at home, or their grandma lives with them, and kind of framing it in a way that difference is good and cool and adds different perspectives. Instead of being like, my family is different and that’s bad, they were able to change that narrative and say, my family is different and that’s good.
Benefits of UTEC and USF Teaching Program
Question: Reflecting back, what were some of the highlights of your time in the teaching program? What were things that were particularly helpful as you became a full-time teacher?
Sophia: I remember Introduction to the Teaching Profession, the very first class we had ever experienced that had anything to do with teaching. And the professor, Kory, asked us to come up with our ten guiding stars for our teaching philosophy. A lot of us at the time thought, we have five years to go until we’re teachers, I don’t even know. But we wrote them after brainstorming with our classmates at the time, who I didn’t know at the time would become some of my closest friends. Our cohort was small and because we were online [during the pandemic], we had a special connection with each other.
So I looked back on my ten guiding stars right before I started teaching. And most of them, if not all of them, I still felt really strongly about. So I think the program really helped foster my own ideas and my own philosophy of teaching. It didn’t shift it in a way where I completely changed who I was as a person or a teacher. I was able to learn a lot, and I think I’m able to add on to my original ten guiding stars because I’ve had a lot of experience. The program really helps you foster the teacher that you are and not try to mold you into a specific type of teacher. I really valued learning from all of my peers and the professors, most of [whom] were active teachers. The professors would talk about their day and things that they were doing. It really taught me that there’s so many different types of ways to be a teacher and to work with kids. I learned so much from the different types of teaching styles and different teaching philosophies.
One of the activities in a grad class that really stood out was when we talked about the students that we really wanted to uplift, to kind of highlight students that might be overlooked. All of us in the group picked different types of students. It didn’t mean that we didn’t care about the rest, or it didn’t mean that we only cared about that group. It just really showed us that we all had different perspectives. I talked about how I really cared about students with disabilities and wanted to bring more awareness to that. Another person talked about English language learners. It showed me how that the one thing we [teaching students] had in common was how passionate and compassionate we were about the kids and how determined we were to make a change. How we can change something or make an impact on at least one kid.
