A Passion for        Learning
My main purpose for studying education is to exercise my passion for learning. Whether it is discovering new theories about math and music, or simply discovering new ways to improve everyday living I am always interested in learning something new about the world around me. In a continuously changing post-modern world and a rapidly advancing society it is imperative that people continue to learn in order to grow in society. As an educator it is very important to me not to remain stagnant in my own knowledge and perceptions of the world. I realized that increasing my own education, and putting forth effort to develop new methods and pedagogical practices would, essentially, help my students learn more efficiently. Why is it so important that educators continue to learn and grow in their practice? Well one answer is that, believe it or not, modeling positive behavior towards increasing knowledge and developing skills to students will subconsciously encourage them to actively seek new understanding and perceptions about the world.
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Before enrolling into the Master of Arts in Education program at Michigan State University I used to refer to myself as a teacher. Now, I refer to myself as an educator and do not use frequently use the word teacher. The word teacher implies that one has the ability to regurgitate learned information to someone. This means that a teacher does not have to necessarily assess information to grow and can remain stationary in their practices. In contrast, educator implies one who has conducted ongoing research, learning, and practice. The latter reference alone implicitly changes the way you think about education itself, students, and even yourself as an educator. Being identified as an educator is really important to me because it reflects my continued efforts to learn more efficient ways to develop my practice and gain knowledge that I can apply in the classroom to help students learn mathematics.
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Once I graduated from Michigan State University with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Mathematics I sought to complete my teacher Internship year at Ferndale High School in Ferndale, Michigan. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience there connecting with students and collaborating alongside the diverse staff. Some of the courses that I took while completing my internship include: TE801, TE802, TE803, and TE804. Solving problems of practice, applying professional knowledge to specific teaching situations, developing engagement strategies to improve student motivation and self-regulation and inquiring about my teaching moves are just a few of the practices that I had engaged in through these courses. And these practices not only increased my knowledge and understanding of student engagement, learning, and classroom management, but they also increased my confidence as a math educator. Within that year alone I had learned so much about myself as an educator that I had not even considered or had yet to discover. And thus, my motivation to continue to learn more about myself, develop my practice, and grow more professionally had been ignited.
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How did I end up choosing the MAED program at MSU? Firstly, based on my enriching experience during my teacher internship year at MSU, I knew that if I was to continue my education it would be through MSU. The hardest part for me was deciding which program, in particular, I would want to study and for how long. Since majority of my courses during undergrad were math influenced, per my mathematics major, I had a strong desire to continue learning mathematics and possibly conduct research in this area. However, since I had planned to teach at a school during the 2020-2021 school year I wanted to make sure that the program I enrolled in would be conducive to my schedule and that the knowledge I gained through the program would improve my teaching methods and skills. With this sentiment I decided that enrolling in an education program would be most beneficial for me at that point in time. After researching the College of Education site for Masters programs I had narrowed my choices down to two programs: Master of Arts in Education and Master of Arts in Educational Technology. Although both programs provide amazing opportunities for growth in Education, the MAED program offered more courses that I was interested in and did not focus on technology at the root of every course, which may have been overwhelming for me. Furthermore, discovering that MAED is a fully-online program was the final stamp that sealed the deal on my decision to go with this program.
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CEP813 is geared towards increasing educators’ knowledge about the different types of assessments, helping educators develop more effective uses for assessments based on their individual purposes, and learning how to create an assessment design checklist to produce more assessments that increase student learning. Throughout the course I completed four major assignments: Formative Assessment Design 1.0-4.0, Assessment Design Checklist 1.0-4.0, Assessment Renovation, and Portfolio Self-Assessment. Previously when asked about my beliefs of assessment, in the beginning of the course, I stated that grades should not be the sole focus in the classroom and should be used as a helpful tool in classroom management and lesson planning. I mentioned that non-graded tools such as surveys, KWL’s, and peer feedback can be used as assessments to help students thoughtfully and honestly reflect on their own understanding of class topics which provides me with more insight into their thinking. I also said that this insight can help to shape better lessons and activities to meet the needs of individual students. I still believe these things to be true. However, I would now like to add more considerations to this list.
Firstly, according to Black and William (1998) in order for an assessment to function formatively, its results would have to be used as a way of adjusting teaching and learning. Formative assessments provide meaningful insight about students that can be used to inform and guide them along the learning process. Additionally, these assessments also allow students to see their own progress enabling them to improve their work immediately and ultimately improves learning outcomes. When a teacher is given insights into students’ thinking they are in a position to counter misconceptions and redirect learning through feedback and adjustments to instruction (Black & William, 2009). Formative assessment appears more reliable than summative assessments in improving student learning because it behaves more as an ongoing process. I now often use more formative assessments than summative assessments in my classroom and find these to be most effective in providing prompt, ongoing, and effective feedback to students.
Secondly, it is important that teachers in general always seek to mitigate biases in assessments. Assessments should provide multiple entry points for students to display their thinking however this is not always the case for every assessment. Fitch, P., Steinke, P. (2017) share one strategy for avoiding bias when assessing student work implied by cognitive development theorists Perry, W. G., Kohlberg, L., and Bennett, M. J., alike. This strategy involves measuring students’ evolution from black-and-white thinking to recognizing multiple viewpoints and depth of understanding in critical analysis and problem solving. In applying strategies similar to this, I have been able to identify hidden strengths within my student’s responses and consider the most relevant details about the students' thinking when the score is determined.
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In ED800 I had the opportunity to explore various domains of inquiry and their purposes, methods, uses, and meanings. One of the things that made this course stand out to me among other courses that I have taken is that it was structured around a self-paced format and did not include any other due dates for assignments besides the deadline near the end of the semester term. This course was uniquely designed into six different units that included six essays with varying prompts to respond to. One of the major assignments I would like to elaborate on is, A Look into Narrative Inquiry. In the book, The Girl with the Brown Crayon, Paley (1997) engages in storytelling with her students, makes sense of their discussions and interactions, and reflects on the development of her personal and professional identity. As presented in this book Paley assigns value to a nontraditional approach of inquiry that does not center on collaboration between other professionals. Her rationale that, such methods as noncollaborative inquiry encourages the researcher to be more unbiased and genuine, is profound and should be considered for anyone participating in action research. When scenes in the classroom are presented in the book, Paley almost fades into the background as she draws special attention to student interactions. I noticed this throughout the book and had determined that she wanted the reader to assign more importance to the students than the teachers. This observation prompted me to self-reflect and think about the importance I assign myself and my students in the classroom. Previously, I tended to focus my attention more to interactions that I had with individual students and through this research essay, I learned how much more valuable my classroom experience would be through extending more of my focus to student-to-student interactions. Essentially, as an educator, I can provide students with opportunities to learn and at the same time their thoughts, expressions, and ideas can provide me with unique opportunities to learn more about myself on a professional and personal level.
In TE855 I learned new strategies, approaches, and philosophies for learning and teaching mathematics, I engaged in critical examination of assumptions surrounding learning and teaching mathematics, and extended my prior knowledge of mathematics learning to new contexts. I completed various assignments: weekly reflections on readings pertaining to math concepts justification and argumentation, weekly module assignments involving designing activities that reflecting theories of practice in the mathematics classroom, a book club report, and designed a website showcasing action research that I conducted in my math classroom. I would have to say that the most impactful assignment that I completed in this course was the Analyzing Student Argumentation. The question that I posed to guide my action research was, how can analyzing students’ responses to invalid math arguments improve my ability to both anticipate student responses and provide more effective feedback to incorrect statements made by students? To conduct this research, I gathered data from two class discussion activities, homework, quizzes, and self-reflection audio journals across three weeks, from November 16, 2020 to December 7, 2020. During this time students explored a few geometry topics: Inductive Reasoning and Conjectures, Compound Statements, and Conditional Statements. To help make my reflections as organic as possible, I would audio record my observations and overall experience with implementing the class activities immediately after class ended. This research highlighted different types of students that engage in math arguments. Some of my students struggled the most with recalling math concepts and applying them in given statements. Other students had difficulty looking at specific examples to make general claims. I learned that engaging students in math discussions helped model to them, how to explore details in a statement and apply prior knowledge to develop solid counter examples. Like Horn (2012) mentions thinking practices, such as justification and argumentation, serve as branches that connect math meanings and relationships to students’ own math ideas and representations, and results in enhancing students’ ability to conceptualize critical math ideas. In my research I observed that engaging my students in these justification-centered activities successfully increased their math competency and overall confidence working through problems. This research allowed me to see how activities that encourage justification and argumentation provide more enriching opportunities to learn math content than activities that do not encourage exercise of these practices. Since the end of this course I have continued to utilize similarly designed activities in my classroom to support students’ understandings of content by helping them learn not just the how of mathematics, but also the why.
Although I have grown so much as a teacher and professional since the beginning of this program, the experiences and opportunities that the courses in this program have made me realize two things: there is no peak to growth and developing practice and increasing education should be a lifelong career. Additionally, reflection has been a vital component to every course I have taken throughout the program. It goes without saying that growth in both practice and knowledge is only obtainable through self-reflection and it is one thing I will continue to practice faithfully in my career.
References
Black, P. & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. The Phi Delta Kappan, 80(2), 139-144, 146-148.
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Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (2009). Developing the theory of formative assessment. Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Accountability, 21(1), 5–31
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Fitch, P., Steinke, P. (2017). Minimizing bias when assessing student work. Research and Practice in Assessment, 12, 87-95. This is focused on higher education.
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Horn, I. S. (2012). Strength in numbers: Collaborative learning in secondary mathematics. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.