As We Depart

It is sad to say that this is our last class and it is now time for my last post on the semester. Throughout this course I learned a lot of valuable content that I will take with student teaching and further experiences. One aspect that I really enjoyed from this course was blogging. Blogging seems tedious and a waste of time, but it is actually the opposite. Writing every week helps you summarize what you did on that specific week and it also helps organize your thoughts. I plan on implementing this within my classroom and I hope I have enough time to do it as well. Another attribute that really helped me excel in this course was incorporating the different means of technology. Being an ITE major I knew a couple of ways to implement technology, but this class goes more in depth with the concept. I learned how to use technology through the direct, inquiry, and cooperative lesson plans. These three lesson plans were vital to learn with teaching at Bishop Dunn. Before this class began we were required to fill out a self evaluation sheet based on the concepts that were taught in this course. There were a few pieces of content that I was unfamiliar with, but I can see the growth I made throughout the course. Some of these concepts included: the different types of lessons, using some technology tools and a few other aspects. One of the first attributes that we learned in this course were the three lesson plan formats. Through this we were asked to use them within our teaching session at Bishop Dunn. It took a little while to get the idea of how to write the three lessons, but Dr. Smirnova guided us through the process. With her help and collaboration from my peers I learned how to write a well formatted lesson. Through this course we were also asked to research some philosophy of teaching. My philosophy of teaching would follow a constructivism approach. The constructivist involves students to learn by experiencing certain aspects. This would be through the inquiry method where it states hands on, minds on. Students are manipulating materials or reflecting on their experience. According to Concept of the Classroom, "Constructivist teachers encourage students to constantly assess how the activity is helping them gain understanding. By questioning themselves and their strategies, students in the constructivist classroom ideally become "expert learners" (p. 1). As mentioned before this philosophy will help students become expert learners. Relating the concept to expert learners can be correlated to the Bloom's Taxonomy Pyramid. This concept was also taught throughout the course and is meaningful for teachers to follow by. In my other ITE courses, this concept is mentioned through the issue of technology and how to implement the vocabulary of Bloom's Taxonomy within a lesson plan. Using these key terms will help you construct a better lesson plan. This theory will help students reach a higher level and will also help reach mastery level on the content. I plan on using this through teaching because it will supply a guideline for the students and myself. Before starting this course, I knew I was going to have a hard time with teaching Social Studies because it is not my favorite subject. At the end of Social Studies I was a little more comfortable with the content and it also helped that I had a chance to look everything over. I am glad that I took this course at the end of my college career and I am happy to know that I learned a lot in this classroom. This successful course would have not been possible if it wasn't for Dr. Smirnova. She pushed me to excel and go above and beyond expectations. This outlook inspired me to be a better me. I would like to finish this last blog with a quote by Sidney Sugerman, "Teach the young people how to think, not what to think."

Tying It Altogether

It's astonishing that this is the second to last class of the semester. This class was designated to tie up all the concepts we learned throughout this class. Instead of doing an exam, Dr. Smirnova decided to do a mock interview. The class picked four administrators to provide questions to our fellow teacher candidates. I was asked to be one of the administrators from my group and accepted the challenge. Through this I had come up with questions based on the topic I was asked to present. The topic that I chose was the inquiry method. My main reason I chose the inquiry method is because the only way I retain information is through hands on activities. The inquiry method implements this theory in order for the students to learn. After my other fellow administrators picked which method they were focusing on; it was our duty to construct a few warm up questions and questions based on our topic. Honestly, I had a difficult time constructing a few questions to ask. All questions had to be an open ended responses and they should apply to the mock school that we are creating. While contemplating the questions I decided to construct my school through a Montessori approach. This type of school will allow students to use the inquiry method to learn new content. According to the American Montessori Society, The classroom is prepared by the teacher to encourage independence, freedom within limits, and a sense of order. The child, through individual choice, makes use of what the environment offers to develop himself, interacting with the teacher when support and/or guidance is needed (p. 1). Through my mock school, I wanted teachers to follow this attribute within their classroom. Teachers should be helping their students gain that sense of independence and free will. These are a few attributes that I considered through the interview process and building the questions. Most of the questions that I made up relate to this approach and I was interested to see what my fellow teacher candidates had to say regarding the questions. Listed below are the scenarios and questions that we came up with. Please feel free to look through them!

It was now time that we implemented the questions to the teacher candidates and see their responses. Before we started the interview process, we each had to explain a little bit about our school. Which theory we rely on the most and what type of demographics we have. One by one we gave a short presentation on what we expect out of the following teacher candidates. After we introduced ourselves, we started off in our groups from Bishop Dunn. One of the first questions I asked was, "I know that you have been in Dr. Smirnova’s class, where she used the principles of Flipped classroom. How and will you use flipped teaching/ learning in your social studies classroom?" Some fellow teacher candidates were unaware of this terminology and were confused by the question. Other fellow teacher candidates came up with good answers based off of what they do know. One answer in particular caught my eye was the jigsaw method. The teacher candidates explained why this would be a good method and how they would implement it within their classroom setting. When each group was done answering this warm up questions they were then asked to pick out of the bag and read the number off the paper that they picked. I did it this way because I wanted to make it fair for everyone

in the group. Everyone in the group had different questions and they all had different answers. All of the groups used academic language that was needed for this interview and they made excellent eye contact. The one suggestion I had for the entire classroom was not use the tool Voki for all the inquiry lessons. This tool is just there to engage the students in the beginning of the section. There are other tools such as: web quests, experiments, etc. All of the administrators went to each group and presented their questions to each potential teacher candidate. Once we were all finished with each group we were asked to go out in the hallway and discuss who we would like to hire from each group and why. This discussion was in depth and long because there were a lot of great answers. We eventually made a decision and discussed some findings that we had throughout the whole classroom. As a group, we gave them suggestions and some likes from certain individuals to all teacher candidates. Through this time we not only reflected upon everyone, but we also reflected upon the concepts that we learned throughout the semester. This was an excellent way to retain all the information we learned and bring it out in a "real-life" situation. Doing this interview was a great way to end the second to last day and it also gave us tips on how to run an interview. I am looking forward to using these techniques on an actual interview. Until next time bloggers :)

Interview Questions