Reflecting on Who I Am as an Educator: Blog #2 for EDUC 4P27*

Hello and welcome back to my blog! For my first blog assignment, I discussed my preference for constructivism as an educational pedagogy, and I provided a few examples of technological resources that could be used to engage 21^st century learners. My most recent blog was a personal reflection on the feedback I received from classmates and fellow educators, as well as a commentary on my career goals. After reviewing my previous posts, I have highlighted a few of my core beliefs which I feel emerged from my musings, and which also shape who I believe I am as an educator. It will be interesting to see what elements I will be able to add as I journey through this course and into teacher’s college next year.

Backwards design is a new part of my teaching pedagogy which I have not discussed as of yet. Since this process is new to me as of this school year, I am still learning how to successfully use this approach as a method of creating an aligned curriculum unit with a rich culminating performance assessment task (RPAT). It is going to be challenging to create a unit which targets four subject areas, as well as a selection of 21^st century literacies; however, I am already seeing the connections between subjects during the initial stages of scanning the front matter and curriculum expectations for Big Ideas (Know), Big Skills (Do), and Big Values/Attitudes (Be). I am looking forward to collaborating with my peers to create this engaging and informative curriculum unit, so stay tuned for updates!

In the spring after my second year of university, I had the wonderful opportunity of travelling to a country called Namibia, which is located in the south of Africa. This was a volunteer trip offered through Brock University where we got to teach students at an afterschool centre in math and English. Alas, I wish I had known about the backwards design process back then! But even without formally knowing the theory and classroom management techniques that I have learned since then, I believe that my core beliefs as an educator still were able to shine through in my math lesson designs. Looking back, I tried my best to make multiplication (the targeted unit for my grade 4 classroom) hands-on and engaging for my students by using math centers and games in an attempt to reach students with various learning styles. Although there were limited resources in terms of technology, I was able to use simple items, such as dice and dominoes, to make math come alive for my students. Here’s a picture of my rambunctious grade 4 students!

As an educator, I feel that it is important to reflect on your prior teaching experiences in order to continuously improve your teaching ability. I want to demonstrate to my students the value of being a lifelong learner, and to do this I must be one myself. So, knowing what I do now about the importance of teaching an aligned curriculum unit, I am going to brainstorm ideas that I believe would have strengthened my lessons. Right off the bat, I would have loved to connect what we were learning to the children’s lives in order to make math meaningful and relevant. They have a garden on the side of the school, and if I was there for a longer period of time I think designing and implementing the garden using multiplication skills would have been an excellent RPAT! One logical connection would be with the science curriculum, as students are learning about habitats and how plants and animals work together to form ecosystems at this age. Not only would the students be able to design the layout of the garden using math skills, they would also need to learn what types of plants to grow and how to take care of them. This can also connect to environmental literacy by making students aware of the responsibility that we all have to take care of the environment, and how to use the environment to give back to the local community (e.g. by feeding the children at the centre with food grown from the garden).

Language skills could be included by reading relevant literature about gardening along the way, and comprehension and research skills could be enhanced by learning new vocabulary through exploring available media, such as books. Students could also study their local climate and environment, and a comparison with Canada could be made. This would also facilitate a connection to global literacy, as it is important for children to realize that they are a part of a global community. One way I was hoping to encourage my students to broaden their worldviews was by bringing them bracelets that children from Canada had made for them. I liked the idea of children making friendships around the world, and if there had been the appropriate technology it would have been interesting to make a Skype call from Namibia to Canada, or another country. This would also be a great way to include technological literacy in the classroom. Of course, I was restricted in time on that trip since it was only 5 weeks, and I am also still learning all of the components which make up a successful 21^st century educator. These are just some ways that I could have enhanced my lessons to provide my students with a richer worldview, and to practice aligning my lessons to produce a rich culminating task which effectively assesses what my students have learned.

Finally, I would like to conclude this blog by mentioning a few highlights I have found from some of the blogs and twitter sites I have been following. The first is a website called Learning Bird (https://www.learningbird.com/iamateacher) which is an online tutoring option for students that provides them with a database of lessons that can reach students of all learning styles and preferences. Teachers can upload their lesson plans and get paid every time a student accesses that lesson! I think it is a great opportunity for both teachers and students, so I encourage my fellow educators to check it out. 

One insight I loved from Emily Gibbons (www.theliteracynest.com) was this list of “Top Ten S’Cool Tools of 2014” (https://www.edsurge.com/n/2014-12-31-counting-down-the-top-ten-s-cool-tools-of-2014). I encourage you to save this link as it provides a lot of examples of different technological apps and websites which can be used to promote 21^st century learning in the classroom. In particular, I like OfficeMix because it allows you to make your PowerPoints more engaging through adding interactive quizzes, videos, etc. This is an example of a PowerPoint created from OfficeMix and I encourage you to watch it because it is on the topic of embedding technology in the Fine Arts classroom. It had some great ideas of how to use technology to create online documentation of art work and musical compositions. Check it out here: https://mix.office.com/watch/rtltg7vrgdr9 and also consider downloading OfficeMix to create your own educational videos which you can use in your teaching! You need PowerPoint 2013 in order to run OfficeMix.

 Thanks for reading! 

Until next time,

Michelle

Photo retrieved from: https://www.pinterest.com/heathere1030/teaching-inspiration/

Course content drawn from:

References

Drake, S. M., Reid, J. L., & Kolohon, W. (2014). Interweaving curriculum and classroom assessment: Engaging the 21^st century learner. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press.