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

My PDS and mentor teacher has been an interesting situation this semester because my host teacher also had an intern, this blog will be written discussing my co-teaching with the intern:
Co-teaching with an intern is a really interesting experience. First off, it was really neat to watch her adjust her teaching style from the first few weeks of school to currently. Secondly, I was able to, for lack of a better term, pick her brain about my experience and about hers as well. Honestly, I enjoyed the change of pace from working with my host teacher, not that she does a bad job or anything, I just enjoyed getting a different perspective about teaching, and I think that I was able to provide her (the intern) with the same benefits.

Wiki

When we built our wiki, I was really pleased with the aesthetics of it. I thought that it turned out looking very professional and we spent a lot of time in order to get it that way. We were able to get a lot of pictures from the internet and we also were able to build some graphs and charts using information from the state BOE website. I really liked the way it all came together in order to tell the paint a picture of Eastside and Fairmont.

http://eastfairmonthighschool.pbworks.com/w/page/Home-Page

blog posting April 5,2010

My experiences with 21st century West Virginia have been quite in depth. First off as a West Virginia resident, I spent three out my four years of high school I experienced these standards first hand every day. However, I have not had a great deal of exposure with these standards in my classes so far in the Benedum collaborative. I have used some technology as a tutor, almost exclusively with the interactive white board. Obviously I have also had a lot of experience with powerpoint and so on. I think there are alot of intangibles that make a great teacher. First and foremost, I think that a good teacher needs to be able to make the material exciting and engaging to the learner. If a student is not engaged and/ or excited about the material the student is probably not going to learn the material and if they do, then they will probably not really learn it, they will just know the material long enough to take a test. I think that a teacher must also be understanding. In no other career I can think of is understanding as important as it is in education, especially when discussing younger students.

post 2

I think a lot of different options resonate within me to be a responsive teacher. However, I think that the first thing that I need to point out is that I am not yet a teacher. I can have all sorts of ideals and theories on how I will run my classroom and how I will present material etc, however until I have a classroom of my own for a few years I will not be able to fully answer this question, not out of lack of ideas, rather a lack of experience in order to answer this to the best of my ability. That being said, I feel that being a responsive teacher has many positive traits. In the broadest sense of the word responsive, I feel that a teacher should reflect what their classroom is like. Perhaps in one class you have a lot of students who are very opinionated and who want to discuss the material in detail; in your other class, you have students who are very intrinsic and who like to do a lot of reading, or maybe they really enjoy doing presentations and so on. Should all of these classes be taught the same? Absolutely Not. Each class should be taught to the students, because it should be a goal of every teacher to meet the needs of the students and to foster actual learning, not just teaching.

I think that (as mentioned earlier) students need to learn the material and not just be taught. I mean that, in a perfect world at least, students should actually learn and understand the material on a comprehensive level. Too often today students are taught the material on the test and then everything else is simply forgotten, or quickly breezed through.

Honestly, I really like these journal entries. It allows me the opportunity to reflect a lot of important aspects of the education field and it helps me better formulate (or at least begin to form) my educational philosophy.

I am very anxious to see how I will preform as an actual teacher. However, I am also anxious that while I have all of these philosophical ideas about how to run a classroom and how and what a teacher should do in a classroom, but that I will lose these ideas and concepts as I am progress as a teacher and as I, for lack of a better term, get run down I will compromise or give up these ideas and values.

To plan for lessons I do a few different things. First and foremost I go over the material I am covering. I want to make sure that I know what I am talking about before I teach it to other people. Secondly, I try to think about how I should cover the material.

I have not really taught a differentiated lesson to date. I have taught in a class with students that are special ed, however I have not really presented the material in a different manner for them. However, with those students I will usually go back and make sure that they understand the material and help them out if they ask for it, or if I think they may need it.

To me, learner centered means to make sure that whatever your teaching is what is best suited for the learner, and I mean this in more ways then one. Firstly, I think that you should make sure that the material covered is going to teach the learner. For example, if someone (not me) went into a pre-algebra class in high school and started a lesson that was from Calc 4 then it is probably not going to help the students very much. Under this topic as well, I think that the material has to pertain to the students. As a social studies specialization, it would be very easy for me to spend the entire class period, every day to talk about history, specifically American history, however the students need to understand and be taught more then that so I also need to take that into consideration.



Alot of these comments are still true, however as we have gone over more techniques and I have had the ability to discuss the different ways my mentor teacher does her lesson plans I have gained a greater insight on how to plan. I think that were I to plan a lesson today, I would plan one that is more learner centered and I think that now I am a lot more sensitive to the fact that each class (even the same class that is taught more twice or more over the same semester) is vastly different and as such should be taught and therefore planned differently. I feel that planning lessons this way would help students because it is (not to sound repetitive) more student orientated. As I mentioned in my earlier post, all teachers should strive to teach to students goals.

3 lessons learned

I learned alot this semester at East Fairmont. The first thing that I think I learned was just how strict of a teacher I am going to be. My whole family is teachers. My mother, grandmother, aunt, cousin, my great aunt, uncle, and so on. Needless to say, I spent a great deal of my childhood in classrooms, watching what my family did, seeing what worked and did not work, and one thing I have noticed over my last 20 years is that most of my family are pretty strict teachers, they do not permit students to clown around. My aunt made a comment one time that comes to mind; "Someone is going to run the classroom, it is either going to be you or them." My family is one that falls in the first category, and I always felt that I would be much more laid back and easy going then the rest of my family. However, on my first day at East I spent most of the time wanting to yell at kids for talking, or not paying attention or using their cell phones and lots of other things, and it was at this point that I realized just how strict I was going to be. Another thing I learned is how easy it is to just stand up in front of the class and lecture, however it is much harder to engage the class and to get the students involved in the lesson. Finally, I learned that it is not as scary to be in front of a classroom as I thought it would be. Before I started my observations and getting involved with the class I was nervous as to how I would handle myself, if I would be able to maintain a level of professionalness, and how well I would be able to manage the classroom. I am not sure how well I would manage a classroom by myself yet, I think that I could get by, however I do not feel that I would be able to accomplish what I feel that I need to in order to be a "good teacher" by my standards. I have not met my own goals yet, but I am closer now then I was a semester ago, and hopefully, I will be closer next semester.