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.  

Learners in Context Reflection 2

Over the past 4 weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to comprehend, discuss and elaborate with fellow classmates on the nature vs nurture debate, the basics of biological development, and the different perspectives of cognitive development. Which has helped me better understand students’ learning processes and my role as an educator.

Nature Vs Nurture – Today, the debate has neutralized and most theories combine nature (human’s innate biological qualities) and nurture (human’s experiences with the world around them). As an educator, I think it is important to take into consideration a student’s biological make-up and their experiences in order to understand what’s impacting their behavior. However, I don’t believe that students should be limited or restricted in education because of their biology or experiences. "Humans do not inherit genes that result in a specific level of intelligence. Rather, they inherit the potential for a range of possibilities" (Pressley and McCormick, 2007, p. 4). Through discussion, I learned that, “Whether children are influenced more by nature or nurture, our role as educators remains the same: providing consistent high quality experiences and expectation of success” (Allison Koehl, Module 2).

Biological Development – Pressley and McCormick (2007) explain that, “Students can only perform tasks that do not require more executive processing space than they have available for use” (p. 54). A fellow classmate suggested that, “Because of this limitation, as teachers we need to implement some strategies to help students cope with the demands that school learning has” (Eryn Pate, Module 2). In order to help students cope with short-term capacity demands, Pressley & McCormick (2007) recommend that as educators we analyze, simplify, coach and prompt (p. 55).

Cognitive Development – There are three alternative approaches to constructivism: Endogenous, dialectical and exogenous. Considering these approaches from a personal standpoint, I gravitated towards the exogenous approach. In this approach, a teacher provides students with explanations and models of solving prior to them working on the problem alone (Pressley and McCormick, 2007, p. 88). After discussing the three approaches with fellow classmates, as an educator, I believe that it is important that I incorporate all three approaches into my teaching style. As a classmate expressed, “I really do feel that an effective, well rounded teacher will use all three approaches. All three approaches cater to different ways that students learn and discover” (Chelsey Baldwin, Module 3).

Characteristics of an Effective Teacher

I believe that an effective teacher carries many different excellent characteristics and qualities. Each effective teacher being unique in their teaching style, interaction with students, and experience. Personally, there are a three characteristics that I hope to carrying with me throughout my teaching career in order to be successful. First and foremost, I believe that an effective teacher is one that is enthusiastic about their job. Through a love of working with children, adolescents and young adults, an effective teacher can overcome and handle situations that make being a teacher difficult, such as students misbehaving. Along with enjoying teaching, I believe that an effective teacher is one that is creative. A teacher can be creative by putting a spin on curriculum to make it more fun or by thinking outside the box with new exciting material. Through creativity, an effective teacher has the ability to engage their students in a meaningful way. Another characteristic of an effective teacher and one I hope to possess is the ability to be patient with students. From my volunteer work and experience teaching children, I have felt the frustration of a student not grasping what I am teaching. However, rather than giving up on a student, an effective teacher is not only willing to continue teaching the student the content, but also patient while guiding and supporting the student to learn at a pace comfortable to them. As a new teacher, I hope to carry these three characteristics with me and I am excited to learn more about what it takes to be an effective teacher this year.