Reflection of My Teaching Practices in ETC 450
As a teacher, it is important to evaluate what your students know before planning and implementing a lesson. Teaching is more effective when students already know something about a content area and the teacher is able to build off that knowledge to make a lesson meaningful for the students. When a teacher is able to evaluate students’ knowledge, they can better reflect upon the students’ backgrounds and culture. The teacher can then use information gained from assessing prior knowledge, to develop more meaningful connections in lessons to activate interest and curiosity, providing purpose. Throughout this semester, this was accomplished in various ways. K-W-L’s, think pair shares, graphic organizers, and class discussions all were used in order to incise interest in the students and to provide direction of a starting point for the teacher during the lesson.
Planning Instruction
Planning a lesson can be one of the most imperative practices of teaching. If a teacher comes to class unprepared, the students will be greatly affected and act out during the instruction time. Classroom management suffers significantly in the absence of a well thought out lesson plan. Students become bored with lessons that are monotone in worksheets/textbooks, above or below their ability levels, or content is irrelevant to the students. In order to have a successful lesson, the teacher needs to avoid these measures and focus on engaging the students by aligning student-lead activities with the standards. Standards help to make sure that the students are learning all the important knowledge to help scaffold instruction as they age. From the standards, a teacher can then create objectives that can be assessed for levels of mastery. This helps the teacher to reflect on his/her own practices while monitoring the progress of students. During the planning phase it is imperative to incorporate technology into a lesson. This helps to make content more accessible to all students with various needs, and helps to differentiate instruction to increase the effectiveness of a lesson. With the use of technology, students can adapt their work to cater to their strengths, while being engaged in bringing abstract ideas to real-life. Before incorporating technology into a lesson, the teacher first has to explore content of resources available and make sure they are age appropriate while delivering accurate content aligned with the standards.
Designing Instruction and Teaching
Actually implementing the lesson in front of the class can be easy when the teacher devotes the right time and effort into the planning his/her instruction. Standards and objective should be clearly written in measurable and observable terms. Not only does content need to be addressed, but other standards need to be integrated as well to make a lesson well-rounded and time efficient. Core standards, technology standards, and language standards should all be integrated into every lesson. This standards need to be visible throughout the lesson in goals, objectives, methods, and activities. It is also important to make the students aware of what the goal is to accomplish by the end of the lesson. By integrating various standard areas, you are helping your students in academic achievement and literacy of various subject areas.
Instructional Decisions
Teacher should find a balance between whole-group, small group, and individual instructional activities, that incorporate technology, in order to provide opportunity for students to be successful and apply knowledge. Lessons should not be centered around rouge memorization, but instead higher order of thinking skills on Bloom’s Taxonomy. Application, evaluation, and synthesis of content helps to trigger long term memory and allow students to develop intellectually. Teachers need to integrate and align content, technology, standards, objectives, and assessments in order for a lesson to be effective. While the lesson takes place, it is imperative for the teacher be constantly monitoring students’ progress and addressing any concerns or questions that emerge immediately to avoid students drifting from mastery of objectives. As a teacher varying instruction and incorporating various technologies can seem a bit frightening. Privacy, security, copyright, file-sharing, plagiarism can sometimes seem to plague a students and possible teachers. It is important to teach children how to be responsible citizens and technology users. All children should have equal access to technology and it is the teacher’s duty to collect research based technology resources, in order to provide students with knowledge of how to access it correctly. We need to educate them on the world of technology and teach them the legal means of accessing the world through various resources appropriately. Once children have been educated, rules need to be implemented in order to protect your students, career, and academic integrity.
Assessment and Analysis of Teaching
Throughout the lesson, informal and formal evaluations need to be conducted to help comprehend the students’ level of mastery of content. Pre and Post assessments are preferred in order to help establish progress and growth from the help of teacher instruction. Assessment should be directly derived from goals and objectives. It should asses higher order of thinking skills. Assessments can be very diverse and do not always have to be test-driven. Projects, presentations, application of content are only some of the ways to assess students’ understanding, and they can be accomplished with easy through the use of technology. Technology helps to expand assessments by providing multiple means of outputting information in various forms in which the students can have choice in their learning experience. Once assessments have been conducted, then can it can be evaluated by the teacher. Not only do they tell the teacher if the students have understood the lesson, but it also is a reflection on the instructors teaching practices. From data collected, the teacher can then plan future lessons that either scaffold on the content previously learned or remediate instruction for those who need additional assistance. It also, can help the teacher to improve on his/her teaching practices in future lessons by changing their way of implementing or planning a lesson. Assessment provides the foundation starting point for a lesson and the guiding point for future instruction.
Overall Reflection
In ETC 450, I learned how to break down lesson planning and implementation to improve upon my personal teaching practices. I explored numerous technology resources and was able to explore them in real life application of lessons. ETC 450 helped me to learn to make informed decisions regarding the use of technology in support of student learning. I expanded my knowledge on the resources available to teachers and how to use those resources to make content accessible for all individuals in ways that meets their personal needs. Through class surveys from students, I was able to gain self-confidence in my teaching ability, recognize my faults to improve upon, and evaluate my successes for future use. This class helped me to grow as a professional and better prepare me for student teaching. I will most definitely use the skills I acquired in this class to help my students to be successful in their futures, both academically and as citizens in the ever change real-world.
