Teacher, Teach Me How to Teach!

Hi, I'm back! I had a great three weeks in the field. I learned a lot from my mentor and I got the opportunity to teach many lessons. I am very excited to go back in three weeks. Tonight I am back sharing some cool resources that my peers shared from their wise teachers and my own. I got the chance to go through these really cool tools and pick out my favorite things, some things that I might use in my classroom.  I like, I wish, I wonder Gallery Walk example found on bie.org  On BIE.com, many educators are talking about Project Based Learning (PBL) and how we can engage students to take pride in their own learning. Something that I really enjoyed was how educator John Larmer wrote about doing a gallery walk for his students. In some of my classes, we have done gallery walks for our projects. Most of the time we got small notes or verbal feedback about our work that might have helped us currently in that moment. This educator talked about putting all of these comment...

On Friday, my practicum classmates and I had the pleasure of attending the ACTEM education conference in Augusta. It was a powerful experience that opened my mind to some of the great tools and techniques that educators use to support their pedagogy. Not only did we get to see other teachers present, we got to present out units that we have been diligently working on so far this semester. I was able to attend an amazing presentation done by two high school co-teachers from Morse High School in Bath, Maine. They talked about how to apply co-teaching methods to their English classroom. This is something that I am learning about in my Special Education class and I was fascinated to see Maine schools putting this into play. These two educators highlighted how technology and the tools they are using are "leveling the playing field" for students in their least restrictive environment. I learned about new tools such as pear deck and how to create specialized assignments on google ...

As educators and continuous learners in our own experiences, we all thrive from feedback and knowing what is expected of us. There are people who provide us with standards that we have to teach and have our students understand, but there are also expectations that we have to live up to as educators. When thinking of being evaluated and knowing what expectations are, I think of assigned rubrics in the classroom that line up to assignments. They are great when your educator took the time to make a clear understanding of what was expected of you, as the student. As educators, we want to provide our students with tools that help guide them on the path for success.  Here is the good. This educator broke down what the students were expected to do. Expectation is the key word. If our students do not understand what they must do, we are setting them up for failure. Each category explains what tasks the student must preform to reach that level of understanding. It is clear, concise, ...

My practicum classmates and I are presenting our units that we have been working all semester on (so far) at ACTEM on Friday. Of course they are still a work in progress, so I am personally excited to receive feedback from the experienced educators who are in the field! In my EDU 222 class (technology in the classroom) my classmates and I were asked to use padlet, a technology tool that we have been testing out to visually create the three stages of our unit that we created. Here is the link to my padlet that provides the pre-assessment, middle learning task, and the summative assessment. Emily 

Last week in EDU 222, my classmates and I had an important learning experience in understanding the student. As educators, we expect to have students that have varied needs that we will need to attend to, but this was an example that we got to experience for ourselves. I was able to realize how different student needs are and how we, as educators have to adapt to how they learn and understand the content. During our class last Tuesday, we were handed "extraordinaire cards" that had strengths of characters. As future educators, we were to see these examples of students walking into our four-student classroom. One side of the card had strengths of the character and the other side had the reasons behind the strength, showing why that "student" acted that way. We began with what we knew, wished, and wondered about the student. Our first card was a vampire teen and my group decided that the teen looked sad, excluded and lonely. After sharing our thoughts with the cla...

Today I am back writing about how I might use community in the classroom. For my unit, I have been asked to incorporate community into my classroom. I really think that is a really neat component and it allows students to see the big picture in their work and to realize that it, in fact, applies to the real world. My unit is based around the power of political propaganda in the Holocaust. I want my students to understand the power of the media and how our words really do have power. My students are playing roles as Jewish families, where they will be giving their artifacts to the Holocaust museum that wants to open a new wing dedicated to personal experience. The students would collect various products showing that they understand the historical content and the connection to propaganda, which would be shown at a gallery walk night open to the community. Students would be able to explain their work, which is a great learning experience for both! The event would be set up like a muse...