Week
7 Reflection
Improvement does not happen
overnight. This pertains to both professions
and other passions in life. In my case,
I am talking about my role as an educator.
When I first entered the teaching profession, I taught my classes like my
teachers taught me. In some cases, this
was not all that bad, especially since I have modeled myself after some of the
better teachers I was able to learn from.
However, I realized that I could not be those teachers. I had to be myself and teach using the skills
that I had acquired. While I was able to
assimilate some of the methods of my old teachers, I had to learn to reach
students who grew up in a different environment than what I had. Many students now have television sets in
their rooms. I did not. Most students now have a computer in their
room, or at least have one accessible in the house. I did not until I was a sophomore in high
school. Almost all students have cell
phones and communicate via text messages, Facebook. or email, which has a
notification sent right to their phones.
I never had a cell phone until I was employeed full time, after I
graduated college. Today, students have
a different mind set than that of students who grew up even ten years
prior. As educators, we must reach the
studetns at a level they are able to accept and at a level they are willing to
accept. “My way or the highways” does
not fly with students anymore. Students
will just tune these teachers out. If we
do not reach these students, we are doing them a disservice. This was probably the biggest area of
improvement that I needed when I started teaching. Now, thirteen years later, I feel I have made
significant progress.
When I improved as an
educator, I made a concerted effort to understand how to motivate students. I set out a goal. At the time, I did not realize I was using
the GAME strategy we used in this class.
However, I used the strategy nonetheless. I became self-directed learner (Cennamo, Ross
& Ertmer, 2009). I set a goal to
better understand the students. I took
actions to ensure this happened. Some of
these were good. Some were not so
good. I monitored my interactions with
studetns to see what I was learning. In
the end, I evaluated the process. While
I did not call this process the GAME plan, I was surely using it.
I have been doing the same
thing throughout this course. I focued
on two goals. They included increasing
the amount of collaboration in my classroom and increasing the amount of formative
assessment. I had always used assessment
to measure how much a students has learned/mastered. There were two problems with that. First, how a student performed on a test was
not always indicative of how much he learned.
The other problem is that I was not using the assessments to enhance my
teaching. Today, in my summer school
class, a student was adding and subtracting negative numbers efficiently. This is an area where he has always struggled. Today, he was doing well. I gave him a few practice problems to work
out for one reason. I wanted to see if
he truly understood the topic. He got
about 70% of the problems correct.
However, when I looked at the problems he got wrong, all of them were of
the same type. I proceeded to reteach
that one type of problem for about 60 seconds.
I knew exactly where to target.
He then worked out those problem again and got them all correct. I used the assessment to enhance my instruction. This was the step I had been missing. I am still looking for include more
technology into both the collaboration and the assessment components of my
lessons. While we do have access to computers
at times, we are not in a position to fully utilize the technology. Hopefully, in 14 months, when we begin our
one-to-one program, we will have the hardware available. Until then, I have to make do with what I
have. When the technology becomes available,
I want to make sure I am prepared. I am
not sure how the administration would view increasing the amount of technology
in the classroom, but not being able to use it because I am not ready.
Throughout this course, I
have learned how to use various forms of technology. The use of digital storytelling is one I
likely will include quite a bit more. I
did not realize the value of students synthesizing their learning through the
use of pictures, video, and animation. The
technology demands are not that great (almost everyone has a cell phone), but the
benefits are tremendous. I have already
started to incorporate the social networking aspect using Edmodo. There are a few other teachers in our school using
Edmodo as well. I have also learned to
trust students to learn using problem-based learning. While I have always encouraged higher-level
thinking, I always had a good level of control over what and how students
learn. Through this course, I now
realize that I can let students run wild with their creative ideas. This will only help their mastery of the
content, not hinder it. I have always been
fearful of turning over so much control to students. I now see the many benefits of doing so. Since many students will be better engaged,
there should be fewer problems to address, even with giving up some control of
the classroom through problem-based learning.
As with all of the courses
taken at Walden, I have acquired quite a bit of information and skills,
especially in the area of technology.
There is no way to improve on implementing these new skills than through
experience. The more we are able to use
these skills in our classrooms, the more comfortable we will be. However, as we begin our next class, I am not
sure how much we will be able to continue to implement. As we start our next course, there will be
assignments using new techniques. There
will be little time to continue to implement the skills learned during this
class or the previous seven classes.
Hopefully, the assignments in our next class will allow us to build on
what we used in this class. We were required
to use wikis and blogs. This was an
excellent opportunity to revisit these skills.
Hopefully, we will be able to revisit problem-based learning, social
networking, and digital storytelling in our next course.
Tim
Trotta
References
Cennamo,
K., Ross, J. & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful
classroom
use: A standards-based
approach. (Laureate Education, Inc., Custom ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth,
Cengage Learning.
