General Inquiry Reflection

4. Content Knowledge - The teacher uses content area knowledge, learning standards, appropriate pedagogy and resources to design and deliver curricula and instruction to impact student learning: 4.4 Designing Coherent Instruction in the area of Lesson and Unit Structure.

Entering our program, while I felt confident in my ability to create interesting activities for students, I knew I had a lot to learn about how to develop formal lessons and units. From this course, I learned that while teachers are evaluated formally on designing well organized lesson plans, teachers are evaluated every day informally by their students to make sure lessons are practical, easy to understand, and engaging. Our inquiry class gave me the tools I need in order to create a classroom that can support these types of lessons full with student voice, engagement, and less "teaching" time. 

This evidence, from Understanding by Design, outlines one of the most valuable concepts to organizing lessons and units effectively. First, Understanding by design states that units are most effective by beginning with how you want to assess students and working to create interesting lessons from the assessment. This book, as well as our class, emphasized the importance of assessment along the way. This is so that students can self assess their own learning and so that teachers can evaluate student knowledge and their own instruction along the way. These ideas help educators create coherent instruction because it is a student centered way of teaching; it allows the student to evaluate progress of proficiency and the teacher to evaluate effectiveness of instruction and gives opportunities to modify curriculum if needed. 

This has important impacts for student learning. First, students are able to self assess their own learning and discover if they need more support and decide what type of support they need. Second, teachers are able to modify unit or even lesson structure to add in clarifying lessons or support lessons if many students are struggling. Also, it gives the teacher a chance to consistently check his or her own methods of instruction and seek excellence as they instruct their students. Finally, having students participating in student voice activities keeps them involved and engaged during class, creating an overall more engaging lesson for students. 

I see two practical ways to apply this to my practice. First, as a paraeducator, I can use this with students who are below grade level to check their comprehension. Before they begin a task, I can ask for them to explain the instructions, clarify definitions, and assess their knowledge of their requirements before going further. Second, I will need to begin to implement this into my lessons. Typically, I plan using only one practice activity due to time constraints; however, my goal will be to incorporate a short self-evaluation or informal assessment before the practice activity as well as after, to see if students are ready to move on to the next chunk of information. I feel that incorporating these ideas will support the growth of my own instruction. 

EDU 6918 Reflection

As a teacher candidate, I believe the process of self evaluation is critical. Teachers are evaluated according to the Danielson model, which asks teachers to reflect on instructional practices and make improvements after reflection. This is essential to becoming a proficient educator because the field of education is constantly changing as are classrooms and students. One topic where I see emerging competence is culturally responsive teaching. Coming into the educational field with a history in youth development, I found Sonia M. Neito’s article Profoundly Multicultural Questions (2002) helped build a connection between teaching and the realm of youth development. Before becoming a teacher candidate, I championed building confidence and self-actualization as key to success for students, as well as advocating for a more culturally responsive teaching in classrooms. While I applied parts of culturally responsive teaching, Neito’s article helped me to realize that only imparting students with self-confidence does not actually change the achievement gap. Her article showed me that in order to support students on the margins wholistically, it is essential to impart them with self-efficacy skills alongside the best curriculum available. This has great implications for student learning. This means I can implement both my knowledge of self-actualization and my new knowledge about my content area to increase student learning and engagement. I can plan units that incorporate standards, ELA content, and allow students to continue gaining self-efficacy.

            This emerging competence will propel me into the school year with practical steps I can take to increase my proficiency of my content area so better implement culturally responsive teaching. First, I have to pass the NES endorsement test. Studying for this test has brought back prior knowledge from high school and given me new knowledge that will help me increase proficiency in my content area. While I will not use many of the historic texts I am learning for my NES test, I hope the enduring ideas of comprehension and growth mindset will help as I begin student teaching. Second, I need to familiarize myself with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Because we do not cover all the standards, I am not familiar with all of them. While I know the standards used for both 9th and 10th grade at my school, I want to meet with the instructional coach at my school to go over why we select certain standards for each grade and why we omit others. Finally, I want to analyze the books we use for our unit at a higher level. While I have read sections and parts of our course texts, I want to read and analyze them, so that I can support students through differentiation and providing question prompts before reading. I believe that these three steps will help me to be more proficient in my content area, leading to a more culturally responsive teaching style.