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."