Unlike many of my classmates, the belief that I am supposed to be a teacher wasn’t something that I grasped when I was studying for my undergraduate degree at Kansas State University. I knew that I enjoyed working with children and that most of the jobs I had ever had involved working with children in some aspect, even when I was refereeing kindergarten soccer games as a fifth grader. And yet, teaching didn’t seem to be exotic enough for my younger self, and so instead of thinking about what I was good at and what I enjoyed doing, I chose to graduate from university with a degree in Psychology and no idea about what I should do next.

 

   Even after I began teaching ESL students in South Korea, and then gradually moved from entry-level positions to teaching at schools that were comparable to international elementary schools, I steadfastly refused to believe that I would teach for more than a couple of years. To me, it was just something that I enjoyed doing while I waited to discover my true calling in life. I still remember the day, though, when I finally admitted to myself how much I truly loved teaching, and how I wished it were something that I could do for the rest of my life.

   

   I have done everything backwards. Instead of getting my teaching certificate, followed by teaching, and then getting my Master’s degree, I chose to teach first, then pursue my Master’s degree, and I still need to become certified in order to teach in the States. For the longest time, this seemed like such a huge roadblock for me that I almost gave up my dream of being a teacher, and I was considering accepting a job with Sprint in Kansas City because it would be the easiest route. However, when I realized how legitimate universities were providing students the chance to get their Master’s degree online while still being able to work and earn money, I decided it was worth the chance to see how much I could learn and improve as a teacher, and hopefully take another step forward towards my future.

 

   I can honestly say that I haven’t had a single “easy” course during my tenure as a student in the Masters of Education program at Michigan State University. Each course has either affirmed for me that after bumbling my own way through years in the classroom, I had discovered the appropriate way of doing things, or they have introduced to me new kinds of information and new ways of looking at things. While I have learned a great deal in every single one of my courses, when I reflect upon the work that I have accomplished over the last two years, a few of the courses stand out due to how much they have influenced my perspective as to what is possible in the classroom.

 

  Teaching Subject Matter with Technology (TE 831) was a class that I approached with confidence. When the instructor, Erica Hamilton, first sent out a survey asking about how comfortable we were with using technology in our classrooms, I replied that I was extremely adept with technology and that I was sure that I wouldn’t have any problems integrating it into my classroom. As a result, it was a bit of shock during the first week when I realized how little I knew about potential technological applications which can be used to enhance learning in the classrooms, and – even worse – I had no idea how I was supposed to integrate TPACK – the technology, the pedagogy, and the content knowledge aspects – while I was designing my lessons. In the past, technology had always been an afterthought, such as, “Hmm…maybe a YouTube video at this point in my class would help the students understand what we’re talking about.” But I had never planned a lesson in order to utilize a specific technology so that the students’ learning would be enhanced.

 

   Our assignments ranged from testing new technological applications and reporting on them to the rest of the class, to creating a vodcast – which can be seen here. The most influential assignment that we had to complete was to take an already developed lesson plan and redesign it so that a technological application could be seamlessly included within the lesson. My lesson plan can be seen here, but, unfortunately, I’m unable to share the Glogs that my students made at http://www.glogster.edu. However, this ended up being one of the most successful assignments that we did last year. My students worked harder on this than they had on any other project, and when they were finished, most of them asked if they could create another one just for fun. That, to me, proved how valuable integrating technology could be within the classroom.

 

   Another course which greatly affected how I teach was Methods and Materials for Teaching Children's and Adolescent Literature (TE 849). Personally, I thought this class would be an easy one when I first enrolled in it, but that was because I had no idea how much more in-depth one could teach children’s literature as opposed to what I had been doing. Throughout this course, we looked at various children’s picture books and discussed about the different ways we could teach them. Previously, I would have just focused on the superficial content without even considering how much the artwork could influence the story. I’d never really studied art before, and so these lessons made my head feel as if it would explode due to the vast array of knowledge that I was being exposed to for the first time. When we began discussing multi-cultural literature and how we should integrate perspectives from various cultures into our lessons, I realized how much I’d been shortchanging my students when I had previously taught them literature. Again, instead of just focusing on the superficial content, I learned how important it was to consider the cultural differences and perspectives of the author and the protagonist, as well as the importance of including books from many different cultures in order to expand the students’ view of what it means to be ‘normal’ in the world. My paper on this can be found here.

 

   By the time this course was finished and I was writing my final paper and explaining everything that I had learned, I was astounded by how little I had known about teaching children’s books to children, and my appreciation for my Master’s courses continued to increase.

 

   Besides learning how to teach the material better and make it more interesting, though, another aspect of teaching where I have learned much more than I probably would have discovered on my own is how to deal with misbehaving students. In the past, I tended to react instinctively to the students’ actions and then punish them in whichever manner I deemed appropriate. However, after taking the course, CEP 802 – Developing Positive Attitudes toward Learning, I realized that I need to spend far more time asking myself WHY the student is behaving or reacting in a certain way, as opposed to just assuming that the student is intentionally trying to cause trouble and that a quick punishment will fix the problem. I was most likely exposed to this type of analytical thinking while studying for my undergraduate degree, but I hadn’t really spent much time considering the students’ motives from a motivational standpoint.

 

   This course did an excellent job of introducing our class to the various theories about motivation which could be influencing students by having us critique a bi-weekly analysis regarding a fictional student, Blair, which was written up by Blair’s fictional teacher. In each unit, we learned how to analyze Blair’s behavior and then tried to apply that unit’s theory about motivation towards helping Blair and his teacher solve his problems. From behavior modification strategies to cognitive motivation to intrinsic motivation, our goal was to learn about the different ways in which students can be motivated, and then learn how to recognize which combination of strategies could work best for certain students and certain situations.

 

   As is true with the other courses that have deeply affected me, this course provided me with the opportunity to immediately integrate the knowledge that I was acquiring and implement it in my classroom. Our project that we worked on for the entire term was identifying a student in our current classroom who demonstrated behavioral issues. After creating a Target Framework for our student’s classroom (Tasks, Authority, Recognition, Grouping, Evaluation, Time), which helps the teacher view how the student may be perceiving the class, I was required to assess my student and devise a motivational strategy to help him get back on-task in class. As we completed each unit, I noted certain suggestions from each one that I thought could be effective in helping my student feel more engaged and motivated to do well within the class, but, in the end, I realized that I had to combine different motivational strategies in order to maximize the effectiveness of my motivational plan.

 

   I feel as if this will have a huge effect upon how I interact with students who exhibit behavioral issues. While it seemed a bit complicated at first to fluidly integrate in real life, as the term progressed, I found myself automatically studying certain students and noting down instances of when they were engaging in off-task behaviors, and then considering how I could help them stay focused. We, as teachers, are in the classroom to help our students in any way that we can, and this course has provided me with an excellent starting point for understanding my students’ motivations.

 

   The final course which has influenced how I teach my classes was my Capstone course, ED 870. For this course, we were required to create a website which showcased everything that we had accomplished during our journey towards earning our Master’s Degrees in Education, and it was probably the first course which I approached with something resembling trepidation. I had never really created my own website before, and I imagined it to be a very difficult process. One of our very first assignments was to try out several different websites, such as Weebly, Wix, Google, and others, and then decide which one we felt the most comfortable with. To my surprise, I found it to be quite easy to make websites on Weebly and Wix, and I realized how far website designing had come since I had last tried creating one in 2003 by using html code to make everything. I enjoyed having the chance to reflect upon my journey and all of the courses that I had taken to get here, but how this has really shaped my teaching is that it has given me the confidence to lead my elementary students into the twenty-first century and ask them to make their own websites in order to showcase their writing assignments for the term. I had never realized how fulfilling it feels to create something like this online that can show off how hard we have worked to reach a certain point, but by forcing me to become proficient in developing this kind of website has benefitted my students  as much as anything else that I have learned as a Master’s student.

 

   I am still amazed by how much I have learned, and by how far I have come, since I began my first course in the summer of 2012. It had been over a decade since I had last been “inside” of a classroom as a student, and I had almost convinced myself that real-life experience would trump classroom learning every time. To say that I was pleasantly surprised would be an understatement.  I have learned so much in all of my courses and my desire to learn more about becoming the best teacher that I can be has been set aflame by my experience at Michigan State University. I began my tenure as a student confident that I was already a good teacher. However, I’m graduating with the confidence that I can become a better teacher if I continue to build upon the knowledge that I have acquired as a student here at Michigan State University.

 

 

 

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