Professional Profile of Therese Turnage

Profile of Therese Felan Turnage, Kindergarten Teacher

Therese Felan is currently a Kindergarten teacher at Stockwell Elementary. She has been in the profession for 19 years. Therese has spent 9 years as a kindergarten teacher, 6 years as a pre-school teacher, and 4 years as a fourth-grade teacher. A Bachelor of Arts in Elementary Education and Teaching was required for her to qualify for this position. On average, Therese spends approximately 60 hours a week writing or communicating in other ways for work.

As a Kindergarten teacher, Therese has to communicate with other teachers, parents, students, and other members of the faculty at her school. Most communication is done through contacting parents. She contacts them through phone call, email, parent-teacher conferences, and a service called Remind 101 that sends parents texts. There are several faculty meetings that take place. She also attends weekly in-services that take place after school on Mondays, in January, and during the summer. Every week she also collaborates with the other kindergarten teachers at her school for planning and any other issues. They tackle things like lesson plans and projects. She also uses an online record keeping website called School Pace to track student.

Therese learned to write and communicate mainly through on the job training. The school she works at provides professional development courses through the school board and the parish. These courses help the teachers to learn better ways to teach, communicate with their students, and develop better organization and planning skills. When a teacher betters their communication and writing skills, the students have a better learning outcome. The school has weekly in-services after school on Mondays and workshops during the summer that are geared towards the teachers. These workshops better prepare their communication and writing skills. Therese also learned to write and communicate through courses in college that were through her teaching program. She attributes some of her skills to her time she spent student teaching. She was mentored by her principals throughout her 19 years in education; Rhonda Snell and Brooke Nolte. Ann Peoples, who was one of her student teachers several years ago, helped Therese in communicating on the job. Sandra McKinney, Therese’s curriculum coordinator, helped her to tune her writing skills.

Therese faces several communication challenges in the workplace. Her biggest challenge is handling incidents with students that occur in the classroom. Therese struggles with communicating with the child or children that caused the incident and communicating with the parents. Therese communicates with the parents through parent-teacher conferences and some parents and children are more difficult than others. Therese says, “some parents believe their child can do no wrong and more often than not, that is never the case.” She also finds SBLC meetings difficult. These are meetings that are for children with learning disabilities or any other learning accommodation. These meetings are for the process of getting a child signed up for these services or to make updates and see if they have accurate accommodations for the child. These meetings happen four times a year per child. They communicate with the parents of the child, administrators, their speech therapist, and people throughout the parish on the school board.

Works Cited

Felan, Therese. Personal interview. 26 January 2020.

Therese Felan Turnage. Linkedin. https://www.linkedin.com/in/therese-turnage-398b2449/.

27 January 2020.