Blog Post 1- 7/2/13
I just finished my 11th year teaching. I taught middle school science for two years at a school in New York then moved to Seattle where I taught 5th and 6th grade math and science. That job evolved into teaching 5th grade general studies. Three years ago I moved in the Leaning Center at my school. I love it there. For the last two years I have been working on getting my masters in Special Ed. I completed the ARC program this spring and am taking my last two classes this summer to complete the masters.
Although in some ways it may seem that I went about this backwards- compared to the traditional way of getting into teaching, I feel fortunate for the way I went about my career. (I have been teaching in the private school system so I have not needed a teaching certificate). I feel like I was given an opportunity to learn from other teachers in a different way than I would have if I had first gotten my certificate. This way also allowed me to learn on my own and sift through what I have seen other teachers do to develop strong opinions and strategies. Over the years I have attended various workshops and have learned that lot of strategies I was employing had names. Going to school this past two years has been awesome. I feel like it has either validated what I have been doing or helped me fine tune my teaching. It has been really helpful to learn new strategies as well. I have not had my own full classroom the last three years, I have continued to work with students in small groups, and even more so I have been given the opportunity to work with teachers to help them with strategies in their own classrooms. I love working with teachers and figuring out ways to help them reach their students- particularly students who struggle.
So for me, a big piece of learning about instructional design strategies is how to help teachers employ them in their classrooms. I really like the book Classroom Instruction that Works. I love books that clearly lay out practical ideas for use, and this book does just that! In this book the nine strategies that are referenced are: 1-Setting objectives and providing feedback, 2-reinforcing effort and providing recognition, 3-cooperative learning, 4-cue, questions and advance organizers, 5- nonlinguistic representations, 6- summarizing and note taking, 7- assigning homework and providing practice, 8-identifying similarities and differences, generating and testing hypotheses.
When thinking about goals for my self- Homework is constantly on my mind. My feelings towards HW are that we should minimize the amount of HW that is assigned. However, it seems there is never enough time in a class period to finish all the practice that students need in order to be successful. Interestingly enough the research about HW is not concrete and furthermore it suggests that HW is more effective for children older than elementary age. Additionally, HW can have a negative effect, for example on family time or physical activity (Dean, Hubbell, Pitler & Stone 2012).
This is an area I would like to try to help teacher really hone in on and make decisions that will really be the most useful and effective for our children. I also work in a dual curriculum school and this leaves less class time for general studies so teacher often feel pressured to assign HW to make sure that they are covering all that needs to be covered; it is a really hard balance! I would like to work with teachers to help figure this out and make sure teachers, students, parents and administrators all feel like the HW that is being assigned is useful.
rebeccaaf 