Marlene Denise Gaunce 222 Bahama Street, Dieppe, nb, E1A 7X7

I have 19 years of teaching experience. Nine of those years were in West Vancouver School District (WVSD), while ten of the years were in Anglophone East School District (AESD). I hold a NB Principal’s Certificate, and a Certificate 5 with the New Brunswick Teachers Federation. Currently I am obtaining a Certificate 6 through Crandall University studying elementary education. My educational background includes a Masters of Arts (with a concentration in Leadership in Administration), and Bachelor of Education (with a Double Major in Computers and Business, Minor in Math). I am currently on paid educational leave with AESD and taking an absence from my current role as Vice-Principal at Riverview Middle School (5 yr term; 2013-2017). My teaching philosophy is to do upon others as you would have do onto you, including enriching and learning from others.

Administration Success

Having experience as a Coordinator of the Cooperative Education Program at two different schools, has been an incredible experience because both were unfamiliar communities. Plus, I initiated a new way of thanking our employers by working alongside our cooperative education students doing their job for over one hour. The employer and student saw me (the teacher) giving back. The organizing and administering of this program required many tasks of an administrator, such as: planning, managing, and monitoring students and their employers, while assessing and addressing workplace safety. Working with businesses and communities comes natural as I grew up in family owned and operated business.

SIP S.M.A.R.T. Goal Success
As a member of the Social Studies and Humanities Team, we achieved success in create S.M.A.R.T goals that all of us could work toward. Our team used a collaborative and efficient process in writing our goals. I was surprised by my success with students using primary source documents, proper research and formatting techniques in their business research papers. Plus, they recognized the assessment rubric immediately. Students could draw on the same expectations, cross-curricularly, of our team of teachers. Using and accumulation of common assessment rubrics will be our evidence of the student’s growth. I was and am a member of our school ICT team. We created our SMART goal to bring BYOD to our middle school.

Cross-curricular Collaborative Anti-Bullying Success

Parenting Success

Over my 19 years of teaching, I have been open to integrating all technologies into my mathematics classroom to expose students to inferential and critical thinking skills. Teaching grades 8-11 and reviewing the middle school curriculum also allowed me to see the progression of topics. Knowing the prerequisite knowledge, new concepts and next grade curriculum allowed me to supplement materials to help student’s successfully transition into the next grade. The organization and support needed to help all learners is often a much more facilitative role, rather than a teaching role.

One of my favourite things about teaching is sharing and helping fellow colleagues. Whether you walk next door to show a colleague the new website you just found or helping them fix the printer. You are working together. Helping a teacher or team meet a students’ needs, problem solving issues or helping organize a school-wide event is all part of our day as an administrator. I love my job and being able to juggle multiple tasks is an important part of my qualities. Plus, my strength is being able to work in teams while keep the end in mind, more specifically, how will we reach our School Improvement Goal.

Taking on leadership roles in a school is another attribute of administration experience. Working on school, and district committees, as well as participating in provincial initiatives has been very rewarding. Serving as chairperson and coordinator for: staff, staff committee, Renaissance Program, Mentorship Program, Parent School Services Committee, Tantramar Education Foundation, and the Shared-decision Making Committee gave me a well-rounded approach to leading a team of diverse people. As well, I marked the numeracy assessment, plus, served on a committee to set numeracy standards for the Province of BC. These experiences allowed me to help department member’s move towards integrating numeracy into their classroom. It also helped me lead our department to develop numeracy questions and processes to help students achieve higher results on the provincial numeracy assessment.

The responsibilities as a Vice-Principal and previously Department Head encompass many leadership roles. I was required to have a part-time and full-time teaching load, in addition to the following responsibilities: led teachers, integrated and reached school improvement goals within our department, maintained department finances, trained technology/software to entire staff, provided curriculum and resource support, presented to Parent Advisory Council, developed a manual for math teachers on integrating Graphic Calculator, plus, liaised and attended district and provincial meetings. I took these responsibilities very seriously and received thank you notes from my principal and superintendent for my leadership roles.

Knowledge of instructional practices and curricula

Professional development is an ongoing, life-long learning process. Educators are looking for innovative and effective strategies to improve student’s academic curricular outcomes and behavioural competencies. Having attended Crandall since January 2014, I have taken ten courses to refresh my teaching strategies, better address all learners, as well as learn various curriculum guides and unique approaches to teaching subject areas such as: physical education and wellness, literacy, music, science and social studies.

AESD gave me the opportunity to participate in learning groups of various subjects to understand the “look fors” during walkthroughs. I now understand what I am to observe as I visit classrooms. I enjoyed the professional dialogue with teachers that follows. I particularly loved having a better understand of multiple subjects’ instructional practices, as well as the curriculum. Our district mentors have done a wonderful job setting our academic expectations and achieving our outcomes. In particular I appreciated their use of the portal of teaching exemplars.

One of the advantages of an administration is being able to lead professional development within our school. Through brainstorm, our core leadership team can share and assess technology and decide on our areas of professional development. This was truly where I see the excellence of a professional learning community, besides our grade level and subject teams. Although, conversations and reflections are intriguing, plus, cross-curricular work and project based learning are apparent everywhere at Riverview Middle School. The uniqueness of the core leadership team is that its grouping are less familiar professional group, thus improving the results of the assigned objectives.