Improving Learning Goals

While at PDS I have developed numerous ideas about how to improve my performance or growth as an educator. I have found the area needing the most improvement in my practice was dispensing the material in a fun and easy to understand way. While lecturing students have a hard time to relate the material to their lives. This makes it difficult to dispense such detailed material to the class. Now that I am in my PDS more, I have found it easier to relate the material to a wide array of students. I can now understand them on a personal level which allows me to use things that interest them as examples within the class. I have learned that it is extremely important to know your student's interests and passions, so you can help them understand how the material relates to themselves. I will constantly look to improve all aspects of my teaching so that I can improve the learning capacity of my classroom.

Lifelong Learner

I think that being a lifelong learner is a pretty important characteristic for education majors and educators in general. An educator by definition has to be pretty passionate about learning (because were obviously not doing it for the money)and it is important for a social studies major like myself because my content area is a constantly evolving and changing field. For example, the recent Egyptian revolution and the ensuing unrest in many other Arabic countries have to potential to change the political landscape of an entire region.
Not only is it important in our core areas, but it is also important because pedagogy is also constantly changing. For someone that has been involved in schools for essentially two decades, I have seen emphasis on many different things I call "testing fads". I can remember when I was really encouraged to be able to free write, which then developed to AR and Running Records to measure my reading and comprehension ability. When I was in high school I would help test students using dibels and currently my PDSs preach standardized testing and AYP.
Furthermore, I think it is really important for teachers to hold education important; not only their students education but every one's education including their own. If someone is passionate about learning and their own learning then by default they will place emphasis on others learning that material. Personally, I am really not looking forward to graduating because I will no longer have easy access to the world of academia, especially my history and political science classes. Lifelong learning