EDU6150 Course Reflection

4.4 Designing Coherent Instruction in the area of Lesson and Unit Structure. In this course, General Inquiry, Teaching and Assessment Methods, I was given the opportunity to learn, practice and demonstrate my understanding of 4.4. Ultimately, allowing for me to develop a lesson plan based on aspects of 4.4, such as learning standards, pre-assessment, informal and formal assessment, learning targets, student voice, and academic language.

Within 4.4, I believe that one of my main takeaways was on the importance of assessment. Figure 1 explains how assessments can be used to determine students’ zone of proximal development. This is a post I made for my EDU 6132 Learners in Context course. In this passage, both Pressley et al. (2007) and myself, imply that an educator is more effective when a student’s zone of proximal development is determined. Through the use of assessments (e.g. pre-assessments, informal and formal assessments), an educator can determine what a student is prepared to learn with assistance (i.e. from what they couldn’t answer) and independently (i.e. from what they could answer). Based on the results of students’ assessments, an educator can prioritize content, provide necessary assistance, and manage time. Most importantly, an educator can differentiate the lesson in order to meet the needs of each and every student. This not only decreases the amount of students that fall behind, but also decreases the amount of students that are held back from excelling forward. In order to determine students’ zone of proximal development and guide student learning, I plan on utilizing my content area’s learning standards to develop a series of assessments across a lesson plan.

EDU6918 Course Reflection

Cultural Competence is enter-linked with being able to be culturally responsive in teaching. To adhere to 8.2 Growing and Developing Professionally, as I learned during EDU6918 discussion, I need to be culturally responsive to my students and fellow colleagues in order to positively impact student learning. Meaning that, as an educator, I must be aware of not only my students’ cultural heritage, interests, and level of understanding, but also my colleagues’. In doing so, I have the capacity to communicate, seek out and receive feedback from fellow colleagues effectively.

In order to grow and develop professionally, I believe that it is essential that I open my mind to the students, school, community and world around me. As presented in Figure 1, there are four basic cultural competence skill areas: Valuing diversity, being culturally self-aware, understanding the dynamics of cultural interactions, and institutionalizing cultural knowledge and adopting diversity (Roekel, 2008). In today’s society, especially in education, you do not have the option of being culturally unaware or absent. Although it is our hope to be all the same, it is a reality that we all are different. This is something that I will face as an educator. I will be different than a lot of the individuals I work with because of age, gender, culture, interests, experiences, SES, and so forth. No two people are the same, so I believe that in really any situation there will be some type of dynamics of differences. There will be times that the differences will be small and other times the differences will be large, depending on where and what I teach. I believe that I can raise awareness of my own culture and experiences by using constructive communication amongst those I work with. In addition, I think that it is important that when I don’t know I ask questions so that I do know. By seeking growth in Roekel (2008)’s skill areas, I believe that I have the potential to be a better educator, colleague, friend, and participant in society.