Inquiry Celebration at my PDS

I won’t be able to attend the Inquiry Celebration this weekend, so I attended the staff meeting at my PDS where the interns presented their action research studies. I was glad I did this because I was able to see what I will be doing next year.

It made me excited to think of a topic to study, but it also made me see how hard it is to think of something so specific to implement. I believe that will be the hardest part about doing my Action Research next year. Analyzing the results and thinking of things to do in the classroom will be difficult, but in my opinion, not as difficult as first thinking of a research question. Luckily I have all summer to think about this. Next semester I will be spilt between my home PDS and a middle school, so I will also have to think about in what setting I will want to conduct my research. I am more familiar with the teachers at my home PDS so I’m thinking I will be more comfortable doing research there.

The interns did a really nice job. They created PowerPoints that had a bunch of important information, but were not bogged down and boring.  They all presented their results in table format, which is something I will probably do next year, this really gives a great visual representation of all the data. One of the interns did a pre and post assessment in which they gave the same test/activity before and after they implemented their study. I will make sure to do that next year as well because it really helps you see the affect your study had on the student’s learning.

It was really interesting to see what they did in their classroom. One girl looked at vocabulary lessons in her classroom and two other interns did theirs together and looked at number sense. I thought it was really cool how the two girls did their together. I wish there was going to be in inter at my school that was placed in the same grade as me so we could do ours together. Theirs was interesting because they were both in a kindergarten setting and were able to compare results from their activities in the two different classrooms.

Overall, I wish I would have been able to attend the Inquiry Celebration because I was not able to go last year either, but being able to watch the interns do their presentations in front of the whole staff at my PDS gave me confidence that I can do the same next year. I also know how I should create my presentation next year.

Characteristics 6 & 7 of the Novice Teacher

Characteristic 6: We believe that the novice teacher should have in-depth knowledge of content.

An artifact I can represent Characteristic 6 of the Novice Teacher with would be my Education 461 Literacy Workstations. I am specializing in English, so I believe my workstations show what I have learned from not only my literacy classes, but also the many English classes I have taken the past 4 years. My Literacy Workstations include many activities for the students to do that revolve around West Virginia Social Studies. Other subjects like math, science, and vocabulary are also integrated into the workstations. I believe this shows that I can take my content specialization area and connect it to many different subjects.

Characteristic 7: We believe that the novice teacher should effectively integrate content and pedagogy.

An artifact I can use to represent Characteristic 7 of the Novice Teacher would be my Education 440 (Science Methods) learning cycle on rocks and minerals. I believe this artifact represents characteristic 7 because my learning cycle uses the 5-E Teaching Model of engagement, exploration, explanation, elaboration, and evaluation to teach the students about rocks and minerals. During my learning cycle, the students work in groups while in stations. I also utilized a lot of visual arts in order for students to express themselves and be creative. Since this is a science learning cycle, I believed the best way for students to learn the content was to have them be hands on and discover information for themselves rather than me telling them the information. I think science is a very hands on discovery subject and during my learning cycle the students get to experience that. 

Characteristics of the Novice Teacher

CHARACTERISTIC 5: WE BELIEVE THAT THE NOVICE TEACHER SHOULD HAVE IN-DEPTH KNOWLEDGE OF 

PEDAGOGY. 

An artifact I can use for characteristic 5 of the novice teacher would be my Special Education 360 Tool Kit. Throughout this tool kit, I used multiple technology tools to create different activities for students. These activities require students to interact with the technology throughout the lesson. One lesson I did with an actual student was a vocabulary lesson. The student who participated in this lesson is a special needs student. I found out this student really liked to draw, so instead of having her use crayons and paper to illustrate her vocabulary words, I found a "Create Your Own Cartoon" program online and had the student create cartoons of her vocabulary words. This allowed the student to do something different with the lesson and kept her attention. I found that this particular student learned well through drawing.  I also had a group of students use a program called Study Stack to create their own crosswords and hangman games using their vocabulary words. I believe both lessons described above in my Technology Tool kit uses different instructional models and teaching strategies to reach many different types of learners. In my Tool Kit there are also three other technology activities, all of which include a specific rubric for the activity during the lesson. 

CHARACTERISTIC 10: WE BELIEVE THAT THE NOVICE TEACHER SHOULD BE LIBERALLY EDUCATED. 

An artifact I can represent characteristic 10 of the novice teacher would be my Art 103 Unit Plan. This unit plan was developed around the idea of students creating their own totem poles. I believe this artifact represents characteristic 10 because this unit brings in the culture of the Native Americans. It integrates math, english, and social studies with the arts, while the students explore the Native American traditions of the totem poles. There is also a Native American tale included in the lesson so the students are exposed to different cultures. During this unit, the use of technology is incorporated as well by using multiple PowerPoints during the lessons. 

Learning Goals

So far this semester I have been working on my specific learning goals. Things have been going pretty good with my class, however I still find myself working on my goal of becoming more comfortable in the classroom and learning how to manage a class full of students better. One learning goal that I have had a lot of progress on is developing lesson plans that incorporate art projects in an affective way. I did a visual arts lesson with my class. I read them a story with the cover of book hidden with paper. After the story, the students were to draw a cover to the story, using what they remembered from the story to develop their cover a title for the story. While many students were excited about the lesson I had a few students who didn't even try the project despite my host teacher asking them to corporate. Many of the students enjoyed this lesson because it was something different from their typical worksheets and workbooks. I am working more towards this goal in the hopes of engaging the students who seemed lost during my first art lesson. My second art lesson the students will be creating puppets to a story they will read in class the day before.

Reflecting On Our Blogs

After reading my original posting from last Fall (2010) about the potential of using a blog to reflect on my experiences in my PDS and the Five-Year Program, I have come to understand why keeping a blog will be a useful tool in the near future when I am a full time teacher. It will allow me to keep track of my ideas and share my ideas and problems with other teachers in the hopes of receiving advice as well as sharing my advice with others. I think the most effective thing a blog can do for reflection on practice is that it allows us to receive feedback from other people. I think the blogs we have created can be more useful if the whole Benedum Program used it and all our assignments were posted on our blog.

I think it is important to hear about what our classmates are doing in their PDS’s because we are all at different schools with different students, it is nice to see how the schools around our area are different, even though they are only a few miles away from each other. Being able to share my blog with my seminar facilitator and PDS faculty would allow me to address issues and ideas that I have in an easy way. I think it would be a good idea to have us write about a certain issue we have come across in our PDS and then get the opinions of the people who have access to our blogs. I would find it useful to use our blogs to talk about lessons we have taught, this way we can share our ideas with our peers. Not only can we share information and ideas with our peers, but we can also reflect on what we do ourselves. Having all our reflections conveniently located in one spot instead of on paper would help with organization. We would be able to keep our reflections all in one area and go to specific reflections on lessons before we teach that lesson again.

Some things that I think would be useful involving our blog would be to post actual lessons we have done, along with our reflection on the lesson. Doing this would allow our partners, seminar facilitator, and PDS faculty to see our ideas and what we think about our lessons. I also think it would be cool if we had access to the blogs of everyone in our class that way we can read other people’s blog and we aren’t so limited. It would be nice to have others read our ideas and have them comment on them too. I think for our blog to be most effective it needs to be used more throughout the semester.

Question: What is your favorite thing about having a blog for the Benedum Program?

My Learning Goals and Practicum Plan

- One of my learning goals is to do a tutor activity dealing with reading and letters. I am specializing in English so I really wanted to see how students react to reading and letters. Pre-k kids aren't exactly open to the idea of sitting down and writing their letters out. I knew since I am with a pre-k class this semester that doing an activity with reading would be hard, but actually just today I got to do an activity with letters. In this activity I worked with 3 students who are struggling with letter recognition. I found it interesting that these students could spell and write their name correctly in order. However, when I asked them to name the same letters in their name just in a different order, it was an impossible task for them. I also got to see how pre-k students handle not wanting to do something you ask them to. They just sit and stair at you.
- I haven't made a lot of changes to my plan so far, just changing some dates around. I am at my PDS school on a Monday and so far there have been two days where I wasn't able to go for a holiday and an ISE day. I have made pretty good progress on my plan and only have a few activities that I need to complete before the semester ends. In all honesty, I haven't looked at my plan once, this is mainly because I write everything down in my planner, when it's due and when I plan on doing it. So making my plan was really just me taking my planner and putting it in a different format that doesn't really work for me. It was a good idea in the sense that it really made me think about the whole semester and when I needed to have things done by. My progress with my plan overall has been good, I just don't look at it very often since I already have stuff written down in my planner.

Digital Storytelling

Some experiences from my PDS that I may consider using in my digital story would be the experiences I have had with the students and reading. I think reading is one of, if not the most important subjects in school. I worked with the students at my PDS a lot with reading and it was interesting seeing all the different levels of reading. Some ideas from my PDS experiences that I can consider including in my digital story would be how every few weeks in my PDS classroom, my mentor teacher picks a different subject. For example, for the next few weeks my PDS class is working on fairy tales. There are castles set up all around the room, the students have made crowns to wear, and during circle time, the teacher reads a different fairy tale. I could incorporate the weekly/ monthly lessons with the read aloud time and make a digital story about the students' lessons on fairy tales. 

Some stories from my PDS that would be interesting to listen to would be how the students react to their reading levels. I worked with a lower elementary grade last semester where the students were just beginning to read full books on their own. Some students were so far ahead of other students it was amazing to me. Some students could read full beginning chapter books, and others were struggling so much with the books that had three words on a page. I found it frustrating when I was working with these students that one student would take 2 minutes to read a book, and others I would sit there and help them sound out every word until they got it. Interesting events and details make a good story. 

Using different multimedia to enhance telling a story to a listener is a great idea because the listener can actually see what is going on. They can picture it for themselves, and it also may have more on an impact on the listener if they can see what you see.