Annotated Transcript
ED870: Capstone Portfolio Course
Dr. Matthew Koehler, Aric Gaunt
Spring 2021
The purpose of this course is to to compile skills and knowledge that I have been obtained through the Master of Arts in Education program at Michigan State University and reflect on the practices that have helped me grow professionally. In this course I created an online portfolio that reveals my teaching experience and details the development of my educational experience, evidenced through courses I have taken during my teacher internship year and the MAED program at Michigan State University.
TE831: Teaching School Subject Matter with Technology
Dr. Douglas Hartman
Spring 2021
This course focuses on developing strategies and concepts for teaching school subject matter with digital technologies and ways to assess the integration of educational technologies with content and pedagogical practice. Throughout the semester I engaged in critical reviews of technological tools that can be implemented into the classroom for various purposes, designed a short math lesson and merged it into a vodcast presentation, and created a detailed lesson plan using an unfamiliar piece of technology and reflected on the integration of that technology into specific math content. The SCOT theory, one of the most insightful theories that I explored within the course, examines the important role educators have in giving purpose to forms of technology through designing, planning, and implementing lessons. As the Scot theory relates to my practice I try to always look for the most meaningful and conducive ways to use technology in my classroom.
ED800: Concepts of Educational Inquiry
Dr. Steven Weiland, Nathan Clason
Fall 2020
This course focuses on the exploration of the essential domains of inquiry: philosophy and history of education, classroom-based or teacher research, ethnographic observation with autobiography, biography and history, and theories of the mind and the curriculum. These particular aspects allow opportunity to think and write about many essential questions of education such as, what are the most effective ways to study teaching, learning, and educational administration and leadership? Or how do we learn, what do we want from teaching, and from education outside of schools and beyond the years of formal schooling? Two of the major assignments that I completed in the course are A Look into Narrative Inquiry and Pursuit of Lifelong Learning. In, A look into Narrative Inquiry, I explored narrative inquiry and Vivian Paley's nontraditional approach to inquiry; collaboration amongst her students. Paley reveals insightful thoughts about how students’ ideas and understandings about the world can impact teachers’ perspectives on education. The Pursuit of Lifelong Learning presented opportunity to objectively examine the life of W.E.B. Dubois and his tenacious nature to educate himself about the world around him through school and beyond. W.E.B. Dubois’ resistance against adversity and his unchanging passion for learning throughout his life is nothing short of inspiring, especially for black educators like me.
CEP 813: Electronic Assessment
Dr. Bret Staudt Willet
Fall 2020
This course focused on the exploration of the foundations of formative and summative assessments and uses, constructing assessment criteria for effective use of electronic assessments as instruments or processes to enable understanding of student learning. Over the course of the semester I explored formative assessment and effective feedback, and crafted an assessment design checklist that I will be able to implement within my own practice. The assessment design checklist has revealed my biggest struggles when developing assessment questions. I realized that I had to think more broadly about assessment in a way I have never done so before and through doing so I have considered more ways I can accurately assess student learning, I have learned how to use feedback to work against student anxiety, and have acquired methods for limiting biases in assessments. Further, Black and William (1998) mention that teaching and learning must be interactive. They elaborate that teachers need to know their students' progress and difficulties with learning to be able to adapt their own work to meet the students’ needs. As a teacher I can find out what my students know through various methods of observation, discussion, and analysis of student work to modify my lessons to meet their individual needs.
TE855: Teaching School Mathematics
Dr. Kristen Bieda, Sunyoung Park
Fall 2020
This course focused on learning new strategies, approaches, and philosophies for learning and teaching mathematics, critical examination of assumptions surrounding learning and teaching mathematics, extending and applying new knowledge of mathematics learning to new teach contexts, such as remote learning. A couple of the major assignments completed in this course include: Instructional Design II and Analyzing Student Argumentation. For Instructional Design II, I collaborated with three other teachers to design a task that would promote student justification. After reading, Promoting Mathematical Argumentation by Chepina Rumsey and Cynthia W. Langrall, we selected a language frame support as our instructional strategy, merged its form to fit the purposes of our content and learning practices for our individual classes, implemented the strategy in our classrooms, and reflected on how it supported math discussions within our classrooms. Analyzing Student Argumentation is the major final project that was completed near the end of the semester; it involved choosing an action to take and investigate to improve some aspect of my mathematics teaching. I completed an extensive literature summary review, collected a various of data from three weeks of implementation of my teacher action, reflected on the implementation of tasks in my classroom in a series of teacher journals, and concluded my findings of the impact of my teacher action on students.
TE861A: Teaching Science for Understanding
Dr. Julie Christensen
Summer 2020
The focus of this course is how to engage students with scientific ideas to learn and understand science. The assignments emphasized in the course involve observing pre-existing ideas and language about scientific phenomena that students bring with them into the classroom, analysis of the correctness in students’ pre-existing ideas and language used, and their impacts in students’ interpretation of classroom instruction. In science, similar to mathematics, learners make sense of ideas through means of asking questions, argumentation, explanation from evidence, investigations, and so on. The major project of this course, Unit Plan Package, exemplifies these critical science practices. This project is a unit plan I created on the topic, Weather and Climate, and includes relevant NGSS performance expectations and disciplinary core ideas, five weeks’ worth of lessons about climate and weather, activities for students to explore concepts of climate, and supplementary teacher materials.
CEP841: Class Management in Inclusive Classroom
Dr. Troy Mariage
Summer 2020
This course focuses on building competence and knowledge of factors that impact student learning, and identifying why students are struggling. The assignments enabled opportunities for self-assessment surrounding our beliefs about learners and learning, existing classroom management practices, developing methods for instructional accommodations to meet the diverse learning, behavior, and social needs of students, and building inclusive learning community within our classrooms. A couple of the major assignments of this course include: Case File Study and Special Topics Project. The Case File Study assignment involved careful analysis of a functional behavior assessment and identifying positive behavioral interventions and supports to aide a student that is struggling with a low self-confidence and motivation to complete tasks. The special topics project involved identifying a unique need in the area of classroom and behavioral management and developing specific management intervention strategies that classroom teachers, parents, or other school personal can employ with a student who is struggling to learn due to behavioral or intellectual factors.
TE804: Reflect and Inquiry Teaching Practice II
Kevin Voogt, Melvin Peralta
Spring 2020
The focus of this course was on establishing a classroom culture, developing effective uses of formative assessment, and facilitating purposeful, productive, and powerful discourse. For majority of the semester we spent time inquiring and reflecting on our own practice. It was through this course that I cultivated my purpose for mathematics teaching and learned more about myself as a mathematics teacher. A couple of the major assignments of this course include: Mathematics Teaching Philosophy and Action Research Report: Collaboration in the Math Classroom. The latter project was an extensive study of how implementation of various group work strategies impacts student learning.
TE803: Professional Roles and Teaching Practice
Joel Berends
Spring 2020
This course is a continuation of TE801 and therefore improving teaching practice, development of a repertoire, and analyzing student learning in an inclusive classroom environment were relevant themes that we explored. However, this course went further beyond this layer, expanding to constructing engagement strategies to improve student motivation and self-regulation, and becoming a constructive colleague to other teachers. One of the major projects that I completed during this course is Expanding Your Instructional Repertoire where I identified an underlying problem that resulted in student resistance or lack of motivation in my classroom, discovered ways in which pedagogical decision-making significantly impacts student dis/engagement, and successfully applied an instructional strategy to increase overall student motivation and engagement.
TE801:Professional Roles & Teaching Practice I
Joel Berends
Fall 2019
The focus of this course was to support early teachers going into their internship with a workshop-based format to help improve practice, develop their repertoires, and learn more about their students in the classroom. We engaged in assignments that led us to analyze and solve problems of practice, learn how to build an inclusive classroom environment, and apply professional knowledge to specific teaching situations. A couple of the major assignments that we have undergone includes: a semester long weekly reflective journal and Project 1: Understanding Decisions that Build Classroom Cultures. The weekly reflective journal allowed reflection of teacher moments in the classroom and their impacts on student learning and the latter assignment encompassed establishing and maintaining a classroom environment that produced collaboration among students through purposeful student-teacher interactions and careful examination and reflection of these moments.