Revisiting my long-term Goal 
The long-term goal I set for myself was to focus on strengths and opportunities for growth. As an educator, I see myself in a field where learning and improvement go hand in hand. Where learning is an ongoing process of refinement to deliver and hand down my students the best of my knowledge and teaching skills.
After comparing my initial and final CSTP Self-Assessments I have grown the most in CSTP 3 "Understanding and Organizing Subject Matter for Student Learning." At the beginning of the year, I was planning lessons merely on my understanding of the curriculum. Now, I feel I am lesson planning using a variety of strategies while tailoring my lesson plans to meet the needs of my students. This is a colossal victory as a teacher because my goal is to assure that all of my students' needs are being met while at the same time providing an equitable learning environment for everyone.
As a sustaining strength in my initial and final assessment, my strongest area has been in CSTP 2 "Creating and Maintaining Effective Environments for Student Learning." As a Spanish teacher, I promote diversity and cultural awareness which ties into establishing and maintaining a caring, emotional, and respectful learning environment for every student. My goal is to encourage constructive interactions amongst students where they feel safe and comfortable to speak Spanish and to make mistakes while acquiring the target language.
My areas of continuous improvement involve learning of my students' background and learning needs. Teaching my middle school classes once a week and establishing long term goals become challenging. Further along the school year, I have decided to seek support from other middle school teachers in order to acquire basic background knowledge of my students. With information from teachers who have my students, I have changed to incorporate more appropriate strategies and adapt my instructional plans to better meet the diverse learning needs of all students. By adding more visuals and hands-on activities I have gained more engagement and participation.
Because of this, I have not only been able to better understand my seventh-grade students' needs but my elementary students as well. By far, my proudest moment occurred a couple of months back as I was having trouble adapting my instructions to meet a student's needs. As I interacted more with the student during and after our lessons I discovered his passion for singing. Therefore, as I decided to incorporate a song for each unit to efficiently introduce the vocabulary I was proud to see him excited and engaged singing along during our Spanish classes.