MY JOURNEY INTO CONTENT, TECHNOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY
To me it is difficult to talk about how I have changed over the course of my Masters of Art in Education, MAED, in a holistic manner because it is tough for me to separate my course work from my experiences as a classroom teacher. I know that I have changed as an educator through the course of time as an educator as a result of my coursework and my classroom experiences. When I started my internship year in education I had a little bit of teaching experience under my belt, but I know I still had a long way to go. The program helped me to grow in my ability to deliver content and understand the pedagogy of education, it helped me to think more deeply about how to use technology as more than a gimmick in my classroom and instead as a deep part of student learning and finally it helped me to see students in a deep light in terms of their psychological needs to be successful. Of course there is more beyond all of this as I could examine how courses took me deeper into national standards, how some took me beyond my normal content to link seemingly separate parts of my role as an educator, like my course on the physiology of athletes to bring a different set of content to my science classes, or even to how I reflect on myself as a teacher through self-inquiry and action research. However, over the course of my graduate program I can think of three particular courses clusters that most shaped me as an educator, two of those course I tend to group together as it was a set of two one semester courses.
My first courses in science education as a graduate student, TE 802 and TE 804 Reflection and Inquiry in Teaching Practice 1 and 2, I like to group together as one course. These helped to give me a firm foundation as a science teacher in the classroom in terms of pedagogy and content delivery.
As I moved farther into my coursework I began to look more to how to incorporate technology in a deeply meaningful way into my classroom and was given the opportunity to explore that through TE 831 Teaching School Subject Matter with Technology.
Finally, I have worked with many different diverse populations of students and this has led me to want to gain a deeper understanding of classroom management and how different backgrounds would influence that. CEP 883 Psychology of Classroom Discipline helped me to look at my classroom through a different lens that will help me to better adapt my classrooms in the future based on the needs of students to help them be most successful.
If I think back, growing up I wanted to be a teacher since fifth grade when I was assigned a project where I had to interview someone in a job that I wanted some day. Sadly there were no ESPN analysts in my small hometown of two thousand people. So I instead decided that I should interview someone that I felt cared about me and that I trusted, it is probably easy to predict that the person I interviewed was my fifth grade teacher. At that time teaching was a way for me to help out other people and to share my love for particular subjects. Fast forward a couple of years to when I was in high school and I started working in a teacher training program where I was in a junior high science class one hour a day, every day. Here I affirmed that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. My undergrad experience was a continuation on this path to become a science teacher and was giving me the content knowledge, and a bit of basic pedagogy, to do so.
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TE 802/804 Reflection and Inquiry in Teaching Practices 1 and 2
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Now we arrive at my internship year. An entire year where I will be responsible for one class for the entire year, and will take on more classes at different times throughout the year. To this day I am thankful for my TE 802 and 804 courses, the back to back courses in teaching science content. While I knew my content, and could present it decently well, it was these two courses that really began to give me the skills to help students gain that knowledge themselves. These courses helped deepen my knowledge of pedagogy such as Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences, to learning about the usage of meta-cognition in the classroom, to retention rates of different methods of material presentation. The differences in multiple intelligences has helped me to incorporate different modalities in instruction, from utilizing discussions for auditory learners, to videos and drawings for visual learners, to motion for bodily kinesthetic learners, to note taking strategies and readings for bridging the gap between linguistic and visual spatial learners, utilization study techniques for intrapersonal learners, groupings for interpersonal learners and the list goes on. In terms of utilizing metacognition I now use things like quiz corrections that include not only the correct answer, but also why they believe they gave the wrong answer and why the new answer is the correct one. This encourages them to think about the answers at a deeper level and about their own thinking. Youtuber David Muller of the channel Veritasium holds his PhD in physics education and actually backed up some of the base ideas of this by showing that people learn information better when they are forced to directly confront their own misconceptions and find the answer for themselves.
They also helped me to incorporate the usage of big ideas and phenomenon as pushed in the NGSS, or Next Generation Science Standards, while helping to bridge the gap with the Michigan HSCEs, or High School Content Expectations. Science education in the state of Michigan was in a state of flux at the time I went through my training and the interactions with Dr. Parker, Dr. Stroupe and Kristin Mayer helped me to have to tools to not just survive those changes, but actually use them together to develop deeper lessons for students. It was with these instructors that I wrote some of my first really deep unit plans, activity sequences and lesson plans in extreme detail that helped me to understand the thought process to developing good planning practices. These same practices have held true as I have also taken on the challenge of teaching math for the first time this year.
Most of all, beyond all of the content and best practices, outside of the changing curriculum pieces, I learned what it meant to be a good teacher in this class. Discussions with fellow interns who were having some of the same struggles I was having helped me to see beyond the scope of my own experiences to make me a more adaptive educator. The relationships I built with my instructors helped me to see the value of those relationships with my own students. While this idea of relationships is something I have always known was important these experiences really helped to cement it. A good relationship isn’t always nice, there are times to be firm and to tell it like it is. But when those come from a place of caring and wanting the best for you it can help you do more than you are capable, whether you are a teaching intern or a high school student struggling with significant figures.
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TE 831 Teaching School Subject Matter with Technology
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As I think about how education has changed most since I was a student myself, I immediately think of the prevalence of technology in, and out, of the classroom. When I was in high school my parents still had dial-up internet. They even had it my first couple years of college, which made it difficult to even go home on the weekends because I couldn’t always access materials that I needed. Where I grew up this was not abnormal so learning that required technology was relegated almost exclusively to school, and even that was limited. Now I look out in my classroom and almost every student has some device capable of accessing the internet in their hand, or at the very least in their pocket. As a classroom teacher I believe there are three options to dealing with technology in the classroom, and this is knowing how much of a distraction cellphones can be in class. Option one is to bury our heads in the sand and not allow technology to be used at all. Option one usually ends up leading to power struggles with students and a general lack of engagement for those students who refuse to abide by this set of rules. Option two is to try to use technology as a way to have a cheap buy in with students. While better than option one, this buy in is short lived and frequently runs into problems as technology outside of content ends up calling to students, pulling them away from the task at hand. The third option is the one that I feel is the best, and that is to utilize technology in a deep and meaningful way to expand student learning.
It is easy to have a student use a computer as part of a district one to one technology initiative to type notes, or turn in an essay. But TE 831 helped me to think about how to utilize technology on a deeper level. Part of the class was having me research different technology tools that I could utilize in the classroom. While there was value in this, and I still use some of those tools in my classroom, I believe this was merely the tip of the iceberg with this course for me. Those activities helped me to realize how to even look for technology tools and I am now following different technology tool focused Twitter users. More importantly than even that was the idea of TPACK, or Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge, which gets at the core idea of not only utilizing technology in a pedagogically sound way to deepen student learning, like how I use the website Phet for virtual labs, but to also teach students how to use technology in responsible ways, and how to set yourself up to be able to constantly keep learning about new technology. I think about how I have now been taking time to help students learn how to research using Google Scholar and how to plot and write equations in spreadsheet programs. These are deep skills that help with the content, but also help students learn how to use technology to help themselves learn.
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CEP 883 Psychology of Classroom Discipline
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My final course that I believe helped develop me as an educator the most was my course on the psychology of classroom discipline. While this was not the first course to hit on ideas of classroom discipline, early courses in my program talked about management from a strictly practical stand point and I read about it extensively as part of my action research proposal, this course went to a much deeper level to examine the whys of classroom management. The psychology of classroom discipline is a much deeper topic than simply what is going on in a particular students mind. Indeed this is very important and was a large focus in the course; ideas from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to help identify how certain behaviors may arise comes to mind from some of the extensive readings in the course. However it is also important to view where ideas of classroom management stem from. Early education was set up in the United States to essentially train factory workers who are obedient and timely. This is a very narrow allowance of how students can interact with instructors and content. It is also not the world that our students live in today, which can cause disconnect between their lives and school, there are some ideas and structure that just don’t fit. In the same breath, I teach in a building where many students live with little structure outside of the school building and to feel safe and secure they need that high level of structure to be able to be successful. To avoid that disconnect and provide that structure is a delicate rope to balance on, and reading from CHAMPS: A Proactive and Positive Approach to Classroom Management, helped to provide tools and insight on how to do just that. I actually still have the book on my desk in my classroom and will read parts of it from time to time to help me in my classroom. Additionally, for students to be successful they have to have strong and stable relationships, just like what was hit home in TE 802/804. Students need to develop that trust that you care about them and are willing to tell them truths, which may be uncomfortable at times.
Between these course, and many others, I have developed into a more competent teachers, who strives to utilize technology in deep and meaningful ways while trying reach students’ needs from a psychological standpoint. Caring and honest relationships will continue to shape my future as a teacher and it is wanting to improve myself for students that will keep me learning and developing, just as I have done while pursuing my MAED, for the rest of my teaching career.