Thursday 29, Ethical Methods

It was interesting to read about the ways in which a teacher can present the information for standardized tests effectively. Some of the examples were: draw on more challenging and interesteing ways of teaching the material that will be found on the standardized tests. Teachers ask themselves questions about the unit that will be taught. Don't make the standards the sole focus of your teaching, integrate it with the larger purposes of instruction. Mix it in with other forms of teaching. Try and make each lesson meaningful to each student. Get to know your students and find out what interests they have. Build a teacher student relationship. Give students the bigger picture. Don't make standards the focal point of your curriculum.
All of this makes complete since because most students will not learn as well using essentialism in the classroom. Most students are progessive learners. The hands on activities and projects benefit them much more then just giving the facts and testing them on the standards. I want to teach in a way that students will be successful in the standardized tests by the background knowledge I have given them. I want my students to enjoy learning. I want them to explore, be interested and passionate about the subjects I am teaching them. I want them to make personal connections with the subjects being taught. Therefore, I need to present those subjects to them in an engaging/progressive way. Kind of hiding the standard and objectives in my lessons. Making sure my lesson plans follow the core standards but they aren't the focal point of my lessons.

Tuesday 27 Standardized testing

Advantages
-They are structured.
-Learn basic skills.
-Higher standardized test scores.
-They can be measured.
-Know what is expected.
-Organized.
-Easy to grade.

Disadvantages
-No creativity is being used.
-The students don't learn to explore.
-There is no diverse instruction.
- Not able to draw from personal experiences.
- Some students can not learn in that way.
- No student teacher relationship.
- No student engagement in learning.

Looking at these advantages and disadvantages has made me stop and think about how I am going to use standardized testing in my classroom. There are going to be times I have to give students a standardized test. Take the end of year test for example, and all of the state tests the students have to take. I am going to try and engage my students in all of my lessons so they are able to draw from personal experiences. I know that it is important to build relationships with the students and see what interests them so you can pull that into help their learning. Students should have a say on how they want to learn. I know that students will teach me sometimes and I need to make sure I am getting feedback from all of them.

1/23/09 Survey Questions Journal Entry

This was interesting to see what happened to the teachers in the different scenarios. Some were surprising to me. I can't believe all of these have happened in the state of Utah. As a future teacher I think it's important for us to take these situations/scenarios and learn from them. We just need to make sure we are careful in all that we do. Teachers need to remember to be professional at all times. These situations we read in class and I did online were mind boggling. There were many times I wanted to say, "what were they thinking?" but who am I to judge. I hope we can have more discussions in class about these types of things so we can understand what "not" to do as a teacher. Therefore, we won't be going into the field blinded.

Journal Entry 1/15/09

The websites were very helpful and interesting to me. On the www.ed.gov site I found it helpful for me because I read through the challenges teachers had their first year of teaching and the one that hit home the most was the challenge on knowing how to teach a lesson that will reach all the students those that are on higher/lower levels. This i know is going to be a major challenge for me and I need to know how to deal with it.
On the nea.org site I liked the highlighted story that talks about no child left behind. It was interesting to see this particular persons beliefs. The fact that students don't learn at the same rates and time is major. I agree with this because all students catch on to things at different times. Therefore a standardized test won't be a great option for some students.
I loved the aft.org website because I did the "A Year in the Life of a Teacher" game and it was fun and beneficial for me to read the different scenarios and pick the answer I thought was the best. This game showed me that I have a lot to learn before becoming a teacher! The websites all were very accessible and I enjoyed looking at them and getting helpful information from them. I couldn't get the mightymentor site to open though.

Journal Entry 1/14/09

After doing the Philosophic Inventory sheet I found that my educational philosophy is Existentialism. My total score for this was 21. The list of my scores are as follows: Essentialism-15, Behaviorism-16, Reconstructionists-17, Progressivism-18, Perennialism-20, and Existentialism-21. These results were somewhat accurate. I do believe in individual choice. Throughout our lives our choices will shape the people we become. Which results in our overall perspective on any given subject.
I don't believe that a quiz like this can be 100% accurate because we will agree or disagree with things differently depending on when we are asked the questions and what time in our lives they are asked. I took a quiz like this in my Psychology class and my results were different. I scored the highest on Behaviorism. This tells me that taking a similar quiz can change the results dramatically.
As you can see, my total points were pretty close to one another. I was not extremely dominant in Existentialism. There was only a 1 point difference in Perennialism. This tells me I could be a little of them all. Not one of them is extremely more dominant on point value than the other.

Journal entry 1/8/09

Last semester I had the opportunity to go to Westside Elementary School in Springville, Utah for my 3 week field experience. This was an amazing learning experience. Terry Whitby was my partner. We team prepared the lessons and taught most of them together. A teaching experience I had there was when I taught the class a lesson on Mexico. I had the students get into groups of four and learn about different aspects of the Mexican culture such as: Food, dress, climate, flag, government, etc. After they because "experts" on there specific subject I jigsawed them so they could be in different groups to do a brochure. After they made their brochures they presented them to the class. The Mexico brochures they did turned out amazing and this project taught them so much about culture. I loved teaching them about this subject and it was very beneficial for me to evaluate what they learned. At the beginning of the lesson they couldn't tell me what culture meant. By the end of the lesson they had so many ideas and answers on the meaning of culture. Being in their school taught me a lot. I was able to see what I needed to improve on as a teacher. Some of the things I discovered/learned about myself are: I say "k" after directions I give. I need to make sure I recognize the time while teaching because I went over sometimes. This was great for me to have this learning experience because I benefited from it extremely.