Bjones0824
1. The text offers an overview of the teaching professions, so the…
1. The text offers an overview of the teaching professions, so the questions in Discussion 1 are necessarily broad. Based on your reading of Chapters 1 & 3 and the Unit 1 mini-lectures, what are the rewards and challenges of teaching? How have these changed recently? Discussion what it means to be a professional and the extent to which teaching fits this definition? What are the different types of schools in which you have studied and hope to work? What are the major challenges you will face in becoming an effective teacher?
Treat these questions as starters for posting ideas and not as homework questions to be answered. You’re engaging in an informed discussionwith me, yourself, and peersabout these questions which are important to our field of study..
Discussion: Week 1: Post at least four times (see syllabus) on assigned readings from Chapters 1, 3 in OER textbook Practical Foundations and Principles for Teaching (pp. 19-40 and 60-81). Post about anything in either chapter. Remember the following:
We know the reading; don’t overuse summary. Analyze instead.
To count, posts must feature a sentence for the subject. Starting with -ing or Why words is a sure way to create a fragment. Example: Parents Dislike Homework Nonexample: Why Parents Dislike Homework
2. It’s interesting to see how some of the needs lower on they pyramid aren’t being met by some communities and families. They then impact the students, obviously and not quite so obviously.
As educators, we are often meeting student situations so that we try to bring everyone to that level of self-actualization while knowing that no two students are in the same place. Even something like sleep–seemingly so basic–can be a troublesome factor for learners. I remember teaching tenth grade about twenty-two years back and having students come in like zombies the days after pro wrestling or Monday Night Football aired.
What we’ll always do, folks, is argue and analyze, so it’s little use just pointing out the basics. In this, I’d say we’ll avoid sounding like the show-and-tell “Here’s Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It’s really colorful and I like it a lot” approach. Instead, look at what you notice, and use those thousands of hours of experience you have as a learner. Just begin looking in a more refined way. In this way, we’ll find that we have more to say and can argue appropriately, asking for follow-up information. So I’ll end this twelve-minute post (and posts are not essays and need not take hours to craft) with a few guiding questions to which you can respond (or not):
Are we failing most at the level of safety nowadays?
Teachers are not immune to these needs, and yet their safety or security (or tenure, retirement, benefits) are often now in danger. What effects might those have?
How might we create elementary classes where esteem is valued but also where we keep academic rigor?
3. Week 2: The Purpose of School (Ch. 2 in Main Text, Ch. 3 in Zhou, Brown as well)
Schools are a microcosm of society. As such, schools reflect similar challenges and opportunities that we face in society. Discuss the specific challenges both schools and families face. Using cited detail from the readings as well as your experiences, discuss the characterizations (and mischaracterizations) of race, gender, and family that your chapter covers.
4. In class recently, someone mentioned learning styles and that they only learned visually, which got me chuckling a bit. That’s a fad that, like others, has held a lot of sway and has gone through a cycle. In his book Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities (which sounds anti-student, but isn’t), John Warner remarks on the cycle of educational fads.
I’m attaching it as an Adobe file. If you can’t open it, note that there are free reader files available online.
What do you make of the numbered sequence of points that Warner explores? (The current fad he analyzes is teaching “grit.”)
Also check out this video from Daniel Willingham (mentioned last week): Learning styles don’t exist. Willingham’s point isn’t exactly that of his title, but it is a valid one about how these classifications get misused.
5 . Week 3: Becoming an Effective Teacher (Ch. 6 Effective Teaching)
As a prospective teacher, how one looks at effectiveness can determine whether one get and keeps a job or is even happy at performing it. We know that teaching has changed more than any profession in the last decade. Why is it important for teachers to be effective in ways that are evidence-based and provable? What new types of supports are being put in place to help teachers? Which aspects of the reform landscape are sensible, and which represent an erosion of the profession?
Because this chapter is one of the first to present these challenges to you, I thought it would be unfair to save it for last! We should know what we are getting into. . .
By now, you realize that you can largely determine “the course of the course” by choosing posting subjects. short sentence for your subject. Make sure you cite summaries, paraphrases, and quotes.
These are foundational chapters, so be sure that you write consistently and with detail.
