I just took TE 301 last semester and feel that I have a nice start on what I need to know to be able to effectively teach a student how to read and write. That course was good because I was able to learn many of the terms and techniques used in literacy education. Also I was able to do a child study on one particular student and in the process get a better understanding of that student's literacy ability. I learned lots during that course, but now hope that this course will take my ability to teach language arts and literacy to a whole new level.
The goals for the class that are spelled out in the syllabus appear to do just that. While TE 301 was an excellent course, I don't think it did enough to teach me how how to plan lessons and effectively set up my classroom for teaching children to read and write. Being able to understand the standards better and how to incorporate them into my teaching will benefit me greatly. Along the same lines, I hope to become more familiar with the general language arts curriculum that is used in schools, across all grades. Also, I look forward to learning about different language arts strategies and technologies that I can use when teaching. I like how one of the goals in the syllabus deals with self-assessment as a teacher. This is one area where I need more work on and which I think will be something that I should strive to do as a teacher if I want to constantly be improving as a teacher. A final goal of mine, which we have already started to do, is to work with and observe how students are involved in language arts. This is probably the most important aspect of the class because I feel that the best learning for me comes from actually being in the classroom and working with students.
Overall, I am excited for this class and feel that it will be an invaluable step as I progress towards being a teacher. At this point we are only three weeks into this class and I am already pleased with what I have begun to learn. Learning about how to best incorporate ESL students into the classroom will be helpful because it is reinforcing in me the idea that a teacher needs to be able to set up instruction that can reach all of their students, regardless of their varying academic levels.
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As you stated on a reply to one of my messages it is funny that we are the only guys in the class, we have the same name, we are both placed in a kindergarten classroom, and we are both special education majors, and now I see that we both agree that TE 402 is the next step in our education to become a teacher.
ReplyDeleteOne idea that you talked about was how important it will be to lesson plan, as I feel that we did not do any of this te 301, and we did not do enough of it in 401. I have loved my experience in the teaching program here at Michigan State University, but if I could pass on one piece of advice to the program it would be to have students write and implement more lesson plans within their placement classrooms. I know that we are expected to do other assignments in 301 and 401 that are supposed to lead us into lesson planning, but to be honest I did not get all that much out of many of those activities, but writing and implementing a lesson plan in the classroom is giving us experience as a real teacher, and that is something that we need more of as students preparing to be teachers.
I like that you pointed out the self-assessment as a teacher portion of the syllabus. I think that this is really important for us to think about. What can we do to make ourselves better teachers? What is working and what is not? I wrote in another comment about professional development and how I see that as so important. I feel like this class will be able to help us assess where we are in our teaching and figure out things that we need to work on and possibly attend seminars for. We should always be testing ourselves and our students.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with Mike here in that we should be writing more lesson plans in the COE, particularly before the internship. That's something I do not feel comfortable with in the least. I feel like with the ones we write, hearing our CTs tell us that it's not a real lesson plan, you'll never write one like that--becomes frustrating. I think we should be involved much more than we are.