<div dir="ltr"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">I think after talking to the graduates of the program yesterday, they gave us some examples of self-efficacy. When the lady was talking about the young boy that had not been in school for several months and no one knew where he had been and then he came back and the teacher told him that he just could not walk back in like that. I agree that she should have never said that but am very happy to know that the principal knew that should have never been said. We had some teachers in our building that would yell at the kids all the time and very loudly. To me that is not an effective way to come across to those students, we do not always know what is going on in their home lives and how they may be talked to when they are home. I come from a school district that is very low functioning (we are the third poorest school district in the state of Ohio). We have students that enter kindergarten, not knowing how to hold a pencil, does not know the difference between a letter and a number, can not tell you what their name is. A lot of our parents do not know how to read. Several years ago, I had a parent that could not read, her child was in the process of getting an IEP and our former school psychologist was sending papers home for the mother to fill out to be returned. I let her know that the mother could not read. Our psychologist took it upon herself to call the mom and set up a meeting time at the mother's house to sit down with her and read the papers to her and help her fill them out. Another example, as most of us have seen, the drug epidemic has become much more present in our everyday teaching life. We have several students that see things that we couldn’t imagine seeing. Our building principal, he would set up times to let some of those students that often get in trouble, come from home lives that is unimaginable, etc. He would let those students “shadow” him, they would get to go on bus duty with him, eat lunch with him, he would show them the positive that could come in their lives. <span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">I feel that our district does very with the collective teacher efficacy. Each year, we work on something different to try to get the outcomes much higher. We do our weekly TBT’s. But I was listening yesterday to the speaker and he said that he sits in on his TBT meetings. We do not have that, we are getting new principal this year and she is already in the motion of changing that. I think it would be very important to have your building principal present during those meetings. I really benefited from our BLT meetings, I think teachers from other grade levels really got to see what the other grade levels were teaching and how it all integrated together and what we could do to change to make it flow together. I feel that our building has the best interest for our students and work really well together. </div>

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