Learning Letter

This course was really challenging! I felt like there was always at least 2 different things I was working on and (along with my other courses) I felt like I never got a break all quarter long. There was a lot of reading and I wish we could have had more time to talk about some of the topics we covered. I would have liked to spent more time on assessment strategies in a secondary school setting and what makes assessments good or bad. I would have liked to cover how to design a good assessment as well as how to gauge whether our students are really reaching the learning objectives/targets or not. We read a lot of articles and books on how to read and how to teach reading, but not a lot on how to assess student reading. I think thats one aspect that this course was missing. Other than that, I think this course did a great job of covering many topics and really preparing us to write lesson plans and use a variety of teaching strategies. I was actually a little surprised by how applicable everything was; I used a lot of the strategies that we learned in my practicum the week after I read about them. They were easy to implement and I could really see how my teaching improved from one week to the next just from what we learned in class and with the different readings. 

          I found a lot of value in the readings; in particular Cris Tovani’s “I Read it but I don’t get it”. I felt like that book had a huge amount of resources in it along with useful real life examples of when and how to use the different reading and teaching strategies. Just like after reading this book, I realized that my teaching philosophy is always changing and evolving after I read different things and try out different strategies in my classroom. Its a little scary to think about how unsure I really am but also good to know that I am not stuck in my ways about most things. I really liked how these readings challenged what I believed and/or felt about teaching and my role in the classroom. 

  I think the most useful thing we did was the mini lessons. I have a hard time with pacing and that assignment really forced me to look at what was the most important things to teach and how to do it in a limited amount of time. There are so many disruptions during a class period and having a 20 minute lesson is something that I can see myself having to do a lot. I also thought it was really beneficial to see how other people crafted their lessons and what teaching strategies they used as well as how they used them. Also, what a perfect way to get some more books under our belts, just like the mini books talks. 

  The literature unit plan was daunting and even tougher than I thought it would be. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like I turned in my best work with that project and that is a huge regret that I have. I definitely learned a lot by doing it and finishing it, but I think it would be a great opportunity to revise it after getting some feedback and listening to what other people did for their unit plans. I will be teaching Romeo and Juliet during my practicum so it will be useful to have some lessons already done that I can just revise and then use. That is actually the main reason I chose to do Romeo and Juliet. Otherwise, I think I would have liked to do it on something else as there are so many other awesome texts that we cover in 9th grade. 

  Overall, this course was really beneficial and I definitely do not think it was a waste of time in any way. It was tough and if I had to do it again I would budget/manage my time a lot better and do a lot more research on my own time.