Marc Finks's Literacy Showcase
Before I began my courses for my Master's Degree, I was not aware of how much work and initiative and creativity would be asked of me. I am amazed by how much I have learned in each of my classes, but even more so, I am proud of the work that I was able to produce as I applied the new knowledge that I was learning in my courses.
Below are just a few samples of my accomplishments during my journey as a Master's of Education student. Click on the images or videos to view each sample.
In “A Passion for Learning”, Phillip Cusick looks at the education of seven eminent Americans and tries to shed light upon what qualities helped to make them successful. As an educator, it's important to understand that different students flourish under different conditions. By using Cusick's chapter as a starting point, I researched why and how Abraham Lincoln was able to succeed after beginning his life in such humble conditions. This was the first time in over a decade where I'd had to research and collate the information into an original perspective, and this will help me in the future if I continue to study the philosophy of teaching and how I can make it better by understanding how to analyze and incorporate what others are already doing.
A Teaching Philosophy
- CEP 800
Before we enter the classroom, teachers should be familiar with the basic educational learning theories. For this assignment, I was required to demonstrate a particular learning theory in a classroom, and then make a photo record of it and describe my perspective about what I was trying to accomplish in the class. Another teacher and I both subscribe to the Constructivist Teaching method, but I decided to incorporate Operant Conditioning as a contrast for this class. By doing this project, I learned how to analyze my own teaching style - as well as another teacher's - and then use technology to demonstrate what we were doing well, and what could be improved upon. Again, if I want to continue my education in Education, this type of analytical ability should be very helpful to me in learning about what others are doing and trying to help them improve.
The world is becoming a melting pot. It's something that most of us heard in third grade social studies, and it seems to become more and more true each year. Our classrooms are made up of students who come from a wide range of cultures, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Teachers need to learn to see issues from multiple perspectives and incorporate them into classrooms. This paper showcases what I learned about multicultural education through my course, as it wasn't really an issue that I had considered before. I feel more confident now helping my students analyze stories as we search for the deeper issues that may be incorporated because of the author's background or viewpoint.
As the integration of technology continues to increase each year, it's necessary for teachers to be able to reassess their lesson plans and figure out how to adjust them so that they can be used with today's technology. For this project, I had to take one of my current lesson plans and change it in order to incorporate a new technological tool in my classroom. I chose to have my students make Glogs on Glogster at http://edu.glogster.com. This project really helped me to create something using the knowledge that we had been acquiring and internalizing over the first few weeks of the term. I am now consistently using TPACK to plan my lessons in most of my classes.
While teachers may already have lesson plans that they can adapt to new technological standards, they will still need to be able to create brand new lessons using technology. Instead of just lecturing and using the whiteboard, we were instructed to create a vodcast, which is a video lesson which incorporates photos and music and a voiceover to explain a certain topic to the students. This was an excellent project for me because I had never considered about different ways that ideas or information could be presented. I've made several vodcasts since, and each one has been a success in my classes.
Even when teachers do their best by learning how students can be motivated to learn, by using different learning theories to help the students, by understanding multiple perspectives and using technology to help teach the lesson to their students, some students still struggle and fall behind. For this case study, I had to work with a struggling reader, assess her reading level, diagnose where she needed extra help, and then develop a couple of lessons and work with her one on one to help her improve. It was very difficult, and yet very rewarding to actually see the difference that this type of teaching interaction could make in a young student. For me, this was a huge step because it's not something that teachers are involved in at the school where I'm teaching. I feel like this really helped me to understand how to diagnose where students are struggling, where they started having difficulties, and how to help them get back on track.
A Showcase for My Journey
This is the first time that I have ever created a website, and I'm really thankful that we've had this opportunity. If this wasn't something that was required of us, most of my work would have just sat in a folder on my computer, and then it probably would have been lost one day, and I would never have noticed that all of my work had disappeared. This Capstone for my educational journey gives me a chance to remember and treasure many of the things that I have learned while studying for my Master's degree, and it also gives me a chance to share it with other people. In addition, this has given me the confidence to create webpages, and I've since integrated them in my class. Currently, I'm having my writing students create online portfolios on Wix in order to showcase what they have accomplished this term. Without taking this course, I would never have had the confidence to integrate something like this within my classroom.
