Week in Review 2/23 - 2/27 due 3/2
Time for your Week in Review posts.
Entries should be posted no later than the following Tuesday for the previous week.
This week I would like you to focus your weekly reflection on the College of Education’s Conceptual Framework.
BACKGROUND:
The conceptual framework that guides our teacher preparation programs states the following:"The College of Education contributes to the theory and practice of the broad field of education, and dedicates itself to understanding and respecting learners in diverse cultural contexts. We facilitate engaged learning and ethical leadership in schools and clinical settings. We seek collaboration with diverse constituencies, recognizing our local and global responsibilities to communities, environments, and future generations."
QUESTION:
In what ways has your preparation at WSU helped you to enact various aspects of the conceptual framework? How do your student teaching experiences connect to the framework? What aspects of the framework are becoming most meaningful to you?
Chris
posted by Heidi @ 4:30 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
A few of my WSU classes come to mind right away after reading the conceptual framework. I think my ESL and Special Education courses were very important with regards to understanding and respecting learners in diverse cultural contexts. I also remember taking a teaching course, although I cannot remember the exact name that was directed toward community involvement and improvement.
So far my student teaching experience is most related to the attempting to facilitate engaging learning part of the framework. I spend the majority of my time developing lessons that I hope will be engaging for the students. I think I am so caught up with the basic work of teaching that it is a little hard sometimes to take a break and try to think about the big picture or theory behind it all.
The part of the framework that is the most meaningful to me is the part about local and global responsibilities to communities, environments, and future generations. As a biology and environmental science teacher I hope that I can impact my students in a way that will make them more aware and educated on how their actions affect the environment and the people around them.
From Katie:
One way in which WSU has prepared me for using the conceptual framework during my student teaching is in learning how to teach for various backgrounds. I have students who come from all over the world and being able to design a classroom that is understanding and accepting of all beliefs, backgrounds, and personalities can be quite difficult. It has been fun working with Mrs. Heit to see how the activities she does can be molded to fit each individual student. For example, I am doing a month long project on animals. The students will be selecting an animal and then creating a powerpoint or poster about that animal. They will be required to write at least 6 paragraphs about their animal. I know that there are students in my class who will have difficulty writing that much, so I have designed the grading of the project to accommodate for each ability level so that just because they do not write 6 paragraphs does not mean that they will not receive an CD, the highest grade.
In terms of responsibility, Mrs. Heit’s classroom is based solely on student responsibility. The students are responsible for their own actions and must be understanding of what they are doing and why they are doing it. We have talked a lot about how our actions affect those immdiately surrounding us as well as the global population. We have been working on projects to send to the troops and discussing how our contribution to them helps to develop relationships with those outside ourselves. The students have responded very well to the idea of reaching out to others.
Collaboration amongst members of the staff as well as throughout the base community is becoming more and more apparent to me. I have been working closely with parents to develop activities for the students as well as field trips that can expand their learning. The staff that I have interacted with have been very helpful in working with me to allow my students to come into their classroom to help with writing and other projects. This is teaching my students how to lend a hand as well as learn leadership. This is a privledge and the students earn the right to go help the other classes. I am looking forward to next month when another third grade class and my class will create a living museum of the United States presidents. It will be a huge project but I am confident that this other teacher and I, as well as the students, can work collaboratively to create a masterpiece.
During the past week I have been working with the students on Literacy Place grammar. We have been reading stories and answering questions about what is happening. I am working with the students on following along while others are reading and being able to read for meaning. The student have been learning about plural and singular nouns, complete sentences, and exclamatory and command sentences. It has been a project that I focus on during the afternoons while the rest of the class is working on their Developmental Learning Centers.
Wsu’s framework helped me from the beginning by showing me how to approach a classroom with the attitude of finding what the student know instead of where the holes are to be filled. From the learner portion I also took from it the benefits of using multiple resources of data to address my students. This gives the students a more well rounded education. It helps me to prepare myself as best as possible as well. I do this in my classroom by looking in their textbooks, at the library and on the internet to find the best combination of activities to teach the lesson.
From the learning section I have taken the understanding that to be a learning you have to be able to make a personal connection. I think that keeping constant dialogue with the children helps with that. Also, constant assessment of the students keeps me up to date with whether they are understanding the concepts I am teaching to them. This allows me to learn from the students and adjust my teaching.
Teaching is about giving the students the skills they need to succeed. I think that doing the required planning helps me to understand what I need to give them. Planning lessons that address multiple intelligences is a great way to help the students as well. Each day I am learning new things to do to address this section.
Well this week was a pretty good week. I feel like I am getting allot more comfortable with my classes and am now starting to get on a bit of a roll. However, with my comfort I have now realized that the novelty of a student teacher has worn off for some of the students. I really see this in the behavior of some of the students. This week I have had to really draw the line in the sand for some of the students who insist on talking during my class. I think that the message is clear and I think that nipping this in the bud is essential to my continued success. I have really begun to feel the crunch of grading 75 papers though. I guess I never really knew just how long it takes to grade that many papers even when the writing assignment is only a page or 2 long. It is really a bit amazing to me, but I have tried to adapt to this by increasing my time at school. It is a challenge but I suppose that this is part of the reality J. I am now pressing to get done with my units on Washington and Adams presidency in order to get to Lewis and Clark in time for Chris’s visit. I think that this is a unit that I can really do a lot of fun stuff with and I look forward to really jumping into it. Well I guess that is about it. Even with the increasing rigors of student teaching Hal and I still were able to escape to Amsterdam this last weekend. It was a great trip and a great city to just walk around which we did plenty of. We were also able to see the Van Gough museum which was very entertaining. Well I hope all is well we everyone else and Chris I will be looking forward to seeing you soon.
Colin
My apologies for the late post.
“The College of Education contributes to the theory and practice of the broad field of education, and dedicates itself to understanding and respecting learners in diverse cultural contexts.”
If there is one thing that I can say in my little expereince thus far, it is that DODDs schools create a great environment to understand and respect diverse learners. The students are very respectful and accepting individuals. There are many students from all over the world, of many different races, creeds, and cultures. DODDs schools also put a lot of energy and effort to create the least restrictive environment for students with disabilities.
In regards to diverse learners, I found Matt Marino’s class on teaching students with disabilities to be very valuable as well as Francine Watson’s course on diversity in the classroom. These classes not only gave me some reference to students from diverse backgrounds, but they also gave me ideas and techniques on how to effectively teach certain students that are often neglected in the classroom.
This is all well and good, however when I am in the classroom juggling the many tasks of a teacher such as planning lessons, monitoring my students progress, honing my classroom management skills, grading papers, creating powerpoints/smartboard presentations, making accomodations, reflecting on lessons and more…frankly the last thing on my mind is how I am connecting my teaching to WSU’s conceptual framework. In my opinion the most valuable trait that a teacher can have is adaptability. When the time comes to seize an incredible teaching moment, or when 2 minutes before students get into your classrom you find out that your lessons will not work for that day (for reasons such as technical problems, concert being set up in the gym, fog delay and shortened schedule, etc.) then I don’t think back to that Teaching and Learning 367 class where I learned such and such. You adapt or you fail.
The majority of my learning in THIS student teaching experience has come from trial and error…and more error. But I feel like I am getting better every week. I measure my success in how many “Great” teaching days I have in a week. My first week it was about 1 out of 5. Last week there were 3 out of 5. I am learning who my students are, how they specifically need to learn, and I am executing my lessons better and better. It’s hard, but I guess if it were easy everybody would do it.
Have a great week everyone!
Colin Donovan
Hello Chris, I am sorry that I seemed to have missed the conceptual framework part of the question for the post last week. I know that I am a bit late on it now but I will still give it a post now.
I know that as i have engaged in this student teaching experience many parts of our conceptual framework have become a large party of my challenges and successes. I think that facilitating engaging learning experiences for me has been both the most rewarding and the most difficult part of my experience. I know that as teachers we all want to have our lessons be engaging and rewarding or our students. I know that this was what i wanted as a student and now as a teacher it is what I try to give my students. However, when you begin to try to put this into practice every day it becomes a lot more difficult. For me this has been something that I have been trying to be mindful of every day. I know to me History is very entertaining and therefore easy to engage, but for some of my students it is less so. So i have really tried to diversify my instruction for the students. I try to give them a lot of time to reflect on what they are learning, i do this in a number of ways. One is verbal feedback, my lecture style is one where i am constantly engaging with the students and trying to keep them involved. In my assessments i try to give the students a variety of ways to meet the requirements of the assignment. on my last extra credit assignment for example i allowed students to present a project on the bill of rights in almost any form that they wanted. I had students who did raps, poems, drawings, posters. Many of the products were amazingly good and really blew me away. To me this is a great way to create meaningful and engaging learning. I think that by giving students the option to present their ideas in their own way it allows them to play to their strengths, and by doing so often be successful.
I know that i still have much to learn in this experience but i think that as i work to better incorporate the conceptual framework into my teaching i will become more and more confident.
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