Hour 12: The Inquiry Continues

·         What did you learn about teaching and learning?

Encouraging student exploration and doing things that they want to do will help them have a better learning experience.  I learned that learning is taking place when the teacher can step out of the picture and the learning is still going on.  Having discussions about what the students have observed helps them to get different opinions and thoughts of what they are talking about.  Giving the students different aspects to think about by providing them with different ways to connect to the real world helps them see what they learned in a bigger picture. 

·         How will this impact your practice as a teacher?

I will try to help students learn how to make connections so that they will understand their surroundings.  Letting the students organize their data will help them also make connection to what they have learned.  I will encourage the student’s explorations of trying to do things for themselves. Using graphic organizers may be very helpful for most lessons and I will try to use them on occasion.

Hour 11: Focus the Inquiry

·         What did you learn about teaching and learning?

How to focus the student’s inquiry,because it is not just answering questios but also understanding, it is important to help the students learn how to come up with good questions. Let the students figure out the answer to their questions; do not answer the questions for them.  The students will eventually ask more questions and answer them on their own. The teacher generally becomes a facilitator. Once the students began to ask questions they always have questions.  Using different criteria to help the students find the answers to their questions is a good idea. Give the students the opportunity to think about what they think before starting the lesson and this will allow them to be engaged and this could also allow some of the questions to be weeded out. This also allows the teacher to determine what level of thinking each student is on.  Focusing on the different aspects of the class will also determine what questions need to be used.

·         How will this impact your practice as a teacher?

Allowing the students to answer their own questions is the first step that I need to work on.  I always want to be able to give the students the answer and I can’t ever figure out what the best question to ask if they get blocked? I will really need to learn how to engage my students with good questions to get them to think about what a good question might be. Trying to decide what the results of what we want to know is a good starting point in helping the students with their questions.

Hour 10: The Process Begins

·         What did you learn about teaching and learning?

It is a good idea to let the students give feedback on the things that they know.  It is a good idea for the teacher to build relevant background knowledge upon deciding that the students don’t know as much about a topic as the teacher may think.  Students think more about what is being discussed when they hear comments made by their peers.  Goals are set but they are only a starting point to build upon.  Allowing the students to take ownership in their own learning is a good way to help them retain what they learn.

·         How will this impact your practice as a teacher?

Setting goals for me and my class is a good start, making the students feel like they can do the work will help us all reach our goals.  The open discussions that we will have will hopefully give students the understanding that they have a place in our classroom community.

Hour 9: Setting the Stagge

·         What did you learn about teaching and learning?

I learned that teaching and learning need to go hand in hand, I particularly agreed with the one teacher that said that there are 32 teachers and 32 learners.  It is easier for students to learn if they are learning from everything and everyone around them.  They can learn from their peers not just their teacher.  As well, the teacher relays that he does not know everything and that he too is learning.  Letting the students know that you the teacher do not know all the answers is a good use of teaching.  Students need to be aware that they can teach the teacher something and that people are never too old to learn.

·         How will this impact your practice as a teacher?

I like these ideas, giving the students the opportunity to teach me is defiantly something I want to incorporate into my teaching style.  I think everyone has something to teach everyone else.  I hope that this practice will invite my students to be more active learners.

Hour 8: What is Inquiry and Why use It?

·         What did you learn about teaching and learning?

I learned that students are naturally curios and they usually lean toward finding things out own their own.  Not giving the students the answers to questions will lead them to try to find the answer by any means they can even if it is the wrong answer.  I learned that is in the students’ best interest to let them “do” things and “think” about things at an early age. They want to learn and they are even more excited when there is something to “do”.  They should be constructing their own knowledge and pulling information from what they already know.  It is the teachers’ job to guide, help and facilitate the students to constructing  their own knowledge.

·         How will this impact your practice as a teacher?

As a teacher I will try to be as helpful in the students learning process as I can.  I will watch how they react to different strategies as the lesson progress that we use; I want my student to develop many tools that will drive their learning.  I will have many open discussions and hopefully some hands on projects. 

Hours 4-6

Teacher Panel Discussion

Listening to the teachers on the panel helped me to realize that teaching is a profession you MUST have a passion for.  Fortunately, I do.  They were so full of advice about how things really are in the classroom form the good to the bad.  I have heard a number of teacher talks about how they have the worst students ever but listening to them I’ve decided that having good students and good rapport with students is totally up to me.  I have also never heard many grade school teacher talk about time or the lack there of, to do anything other than work.  These past two years is defiantly prepared me for the long hours, days, weeks, and months of work and no sleep.  I just want to be able to manage my class with dignity and respect for both sides and retain all control of the class. The things they said about not sending kids to the office a lot really makes sense when I think about it.  One other thing that stuck with me was the talk about being the students advisory without being their friend; I think it is going to be the most difficult task in my life.  How can a person possibly be around another person everyday for eight hours and not eventually have an overwhelming love for them?  That is the only thing that no one can tell me how to cope with.  The fact that they said it is ok to befriend the students to a certain extent gives me more hope.

Hour 7: The Learning Classroom

• Did you meet this objective during this part of our course? If so, how?

 If not, why? I think I begin to meet the objective after I realized what the objective was, using different techniques to teach students.  Using many different learning styles and adding many different aspects to the problem will enhance the learning process.  I will try to incorporate many different teaching techniques so that all the students will be able to understand what we are discussing.  I will need to design my lesson to suit all the ELL students as well as special needs students, the biggest issue I think will be to figure out how to not leave anyone out and to make sure that the lesson is engaging for every student.

• What particular content or activity enabled you to meet this objective?

 Deciding what kind of students I am teaching and how they learn is going to be very important for me to know.  I need to be able to understand that not all students learn the same way and then I need to know how to adjust my lessons for those students.

• What questions do you have that are relevant to this objective that might guide you later in the course?

How can I structure my lessons to reach all my students so that the lessons will s hold the students attention? (not to easy/not to hard) How will I know what kinds of material to incorporate into my lessons?

• How would you describe what you learned?

 I learned that the student need to learn how to think, reflect on their own thinking, and see how the things that they have thought on can relate to other subject areas. When they do this they have learned to convey what they intend to get across.

Part 2:

• What was discussed that reinforced something you already knew or believed about children's development and learning?

 I already knew that student develop differently therefore causing them to learn differently and at different stages in their lives.  I knew that all children develop differently through different paths. I also knew that students need to be taught within their zone of proximal development.  It is the teacher’s job to understand when the student is ready to learn something new and also know how to present the information to the students so that they will be able to learn it. 

• What, is anything, was new or surprising to you?

 The spiral curriculum was somewhat of a shock to me but it is something that I have always thought should be implemented in the schools.  Most things that we learn eventually connects to each other if weather we can see it or not thing always connect so my question would be why not connect everything the students are learning at this point in their lives?

• How might these realizations affect what you do in the classroom?

Understanding that all my students are different and have not been produced on an assembly line, I will need to be able to produce lessons that are tangible for all the students.  It will be my job to determine how each student learns and then apply that knowledge to everything I do in my class.  I also need to remember that the lessons need to reach all the students and I need to make sure the supplemental work is not to boring for some and not to accelerated for others.