Weekly Reflections

WEEK 2 (JANUARY 17TH) – I felt a lot more comfortable in class this week. I feel confident about the eportfolio and how it should be laid out. I liked that we were able to see others and all the different ways we could see how they could be done. I enjoy doing the daily responses as I can look back at them and read back to what we did in each class. This week we also started the learning circles and read about chapter 1 & 2. I had just picked up my textbook before this class so I had very little time to read through the two chapters, but am excited to read the next chapters in the textbook. The first class I was a little unsure about the “poll guru” but this week I really enjoyed it. It gave me an opportunity to be heard within the class and really think about how I feel about the topics. And I also enjoy that it gives my professor the opportunity to hear my thoughts and how well we are all understanding the topics, and if we are unsure of what is going on it lets the prof know what to give verification on. Later on in the class when we broke into breakout rooms we talked about what we already know about assessment. I was relieved that I was not the only one to not have a lot of knowledge about assessment. I already know that is it important to give student feedback about what they can improve on, but alsoto let them know what they did good. Overall, I am excited to look back at what I knew before this class and then looking at what I have learned through the semester and seeing how much I grew as an educator.

(poll guru graphs)

WEEK 3 (JANUARY 24TH) – I am very excited to start my interview with 2 different teachers. I think that I can pick up a lot from other teachers and their different opinions and methods of teaching. I am also really enjoying the learning circles and pick up a lot from my peer teachers too. I enjoy talking with different students that I didn’t know prior. In the learning circles I like that we spent a lot of time talking about giving feedback to the students and also communicating with the parents. I strongly believe that it is crucial to keep in contact with parents about how their child is doing and what they are learning. In my past internships I have never thought about using other students work to show my present students work about my expectations. But thinking more on it I believe that it could be a good assessed as long as I take their name off of the project. This week I have gotten more used to the poll guru and really like seeing what other students think of different topics in class. I think there is going to be a lot of different teachers that are going to come out of this class, but I believe that we are all going to find our path and succeed. I really appreciate that even being in university we get examples of what our work is supposed to be, and we even get partial say of what our rubric layout is. I think that seeing prior work and having a layout and creating steps for ourselves of completing assignments is better for us to succeed in this class.

(changing rubrics as a teacher to fit the present class and sharing feedback with parents not just students)

WEEK 4 (JANUARY 31ST) – This class made me think a lot about co-constructing with lessons and rubrics. While doing my pre internship I never had the opportunity to do this, but have plans to do so in my three week block. By doing so we as teachers learn more about what they know about the topic at hand. This also allows students to have feelings of ownership and have a say in how they are getting marked for the class. When teachers improvise the criteria no matter how clear it is, it is not as effective as when students help set the criteria in their own words. I am already done my unit plan that I am going to use for my three week block, but I would like to talk to my cooperating teacher and see if incorporating my students in the rubric is possible. I think this would be the perfect opportunity to do for the final project that I have assigned them to do at the very end. I have no previous experience with doing this so I feel like doing this with the help of my cooperating teacher would be beneficial and prepare me for my biginternship. At the end of class this week I also really enjoyed talking to my peers about culture and their point of view on it. I gathered that we all come very different places in the country and we all have different views on many things. For example, I grew up in Grenfell on the farm so moving to Regina for university was a big change for me. Growing up in a small town was very different, in a class of 20 students, the same from kindergarten to graduation we were all the same ethnicity and had the same beliefs. I was not exposed to many different cultures a lot until I moved. In our small groups we also talked about the classes that were offered in our high school. There was 1 class in my high school that was offered and that I took, native studies. We talked a lot about residential schools but never really went into depth about anything else. In university I was able to take Indigenous studies and I learned 10x more than I ever did in high school. I was thankful to take that class and broaden my knowledge about the past and reconciliation, and now I will take that knowledge into my lessons and pass it on to my students.

(sharing knowledge about treaty and creating a ripple effect)

WEEK 5 (FEBRUARY 7TH) – In the very beginning of class while in our learning circle groups and when we got back into the large class, we talked a lot about peer assessment. I really like the idea of peer assessment and think that it could be a great idea if the students are fully prepared for such a task. I see pros and cons of doing this. For example, students that are not quite mature enough could have issues with this. And it could be a harder concept for younger children to grasp. I believe that the time when this should be done with students would be high school students and even university students. I find it very useful for myself in university as we are all in the same degree working to the same goals, but at the same time we are all different people and have different opinions, so it is a plus for us when we get to talk to our peers and learn their opinions and how they think we can all improve together. Some other pros of peer assessment are enhancing critical thinking skills as well as communication skills within students. And not only are these skills crucial in school but in all aspects of life. In class we also spoke about performance stations. I really love the idea of these as they can be so diverse and give students different opportunities to show their learning in ways that aren’t just writing on a paper. They give the students the opportunity for multi sensory learning from visual, auditory, kinesthetics and even tactile opportunities to show their work. This creates a space for all students to show their individual strengths.  I also like it because it gives students the opportunity to get up and move and be active and interact with different types of materials, rather than sitting alone in their desks. Within all of these different types of assessments another important thing is giving feedback. It is crucial for students to receive feedback so they know what they are doing good and how they can improve for next time. I specifically like the idea of feed forward feedback as it focuses on improvement and development for the future, and identifying the areas for growth for students and teachers.

(peer assessment)

WEEK 6 (FEBRUARY 14TH) – This week I was away on vacation, therefore was unable to attend class. From talking with other students in the class and taking a look at the agenda, as well as links in the course, this is what I have gathered. I really like the thought of graphic organizers. I think they are a great way to further explain things to students and to simply see step by step process of learning. Which therefore enhances comprehension making it easier for students  to understand complex concepts. I also believe that they facility critical learning and active engagement. My favourite thing about graphic organizers is that they are so diverse, so teachers can mold them to different students depending on their level of knowledge and their grade level as well. I also read about student-led conferences. I have mixed feelings about student led conferences, as I think it really depends on the age and maturity of yourstudents. Although I think that is a great opportunity for students to share their ideas to their parents in their own words, rather than hearing the same thing from teachers all the time. I also believe that having parents there with the students and giving the students the opportunity to share their thought, perhaps the students might be more comfortable sharing how they feel and a teacher can really get the idea. This week we also worked on our teacher interviews, which I have completed and placed in my eportfolio. I really enjoyed the opportunity to do this, although I have a few teacher friends I never thought about going this in depth about assessment with them. I learned a lot and it changed my point of view on a few different things although I still feel strongly about others.

(graphic organizers and student led conferences)

WEEK 7 (FEBRUARY 28TH) – At the beginning of class we did a poll guru and something that caught my attention was the amount of peers in my class that like to leave their assignments to the very last minute. Whereas I am the complete opposite, I like to work ahead and be hand things in early. I was always told when I was younger to not leave things till the end because life happens and sometimes you have something else that needs to be done then you have to end up handing something in late, and I don’t want to risk losing late marks. In poll guru we also spoke about the assessment criteria we had completed for the dialogue papers. I believe that doing the one that I have already done, as well as the 8 that I will complete next week will really help me get more comparable with assessing things and sharing with my classmates what I like about their assignment and things that they might want to consider improving on. We also talked about cultural inclusion in the classroom. Something that I want to do in my classroom to ensure cultural inclusion, is to acknowledge and respect diversity, by celebrating the cultural backgrounds, traditions, languages, and experiences of all my students. And to encourage my students to share that with my and their peers. I want to do this all while creating a safe and inclusive classroom environment, by setting clear expectations for respectful behaviour and address any instance of bias, discrimination or exclusion. Later on in the class in our breakout rooms we talked about attendance and if it should be a part of your grade. I think yes and no at the same time. I believe that if you have students that are constantly late or not in class without being excused for a solid reason that there could be the possibility to lose marks, but if it is just once or twice and it rarely happens I believe that there should be no marks lost. I am a strong believer in mental health and sometimes students just need some time to reset and get caught up on their work, so if they need to take that one day or few hours, they should not be punished for it.

(cultural inclusion in the classroom)

WEEK 8 (MARCH 6TH) – To start off class we spent an hour making each others dialogue papers. I feel that I learned quite a but from this process as I got to read 7 other peoples paper and learn about what works for them and what doesn’t. Some of the questions that my peers asked were very original and creative and things that I never thought to ask. I agreed with most of my peers about what they think on assessment but some of the things I also disagreed with. Something that I don’t think should happen in an elementary aged classroom is peer assessment. I do not think that they are old enough and mature enough to properly assess one of their classmates. Lots of things come to play in this as they might have gotten in an argument with someone and just give them a bad grade because of that. But I think peer assessment is a great activity for older ages that are mature enough to know why they are doing that and how it is going to help them in the future. By peer assessing my classmates I got to read about new ideas and had the chance to practice marking things which will help me become a better educator in the future. I also read the paper on 252 influences and effect sizes related to student achievement. I was not shocked to see that collective teach efficacy was at the top. This encourages high expectations, increased effort and persistence, a positive school culture, teacher collaboration and strong leadership. If the teachers are good at their jobs it leads to students being more successful. Although I was shocked to see that technology in distance education was at the bottom. In this day and age it is rare to see that students don’t have their own technology device at home and ready to use. But I also think that teachers should not rely on that because sometimes students don’t have access to technology and it leads them to have a disadvantage. I think there are so many other ways for teachers to sent homework to students for them to complete that does not have to do with technology, and even if there is an assignment that a computer may be needed, class time should be used for that. I was also shocked to see performance goals at the bottom of the list as well. I remember being in grade school and always at the beginning of the year making goals for myself and my learning. And when I become a teacher I also want to do that with my students and help them to reach those goals throughout the year.

(marking the dialogue papers)

WEEK 9 (APRIL 3RD) – This was the first week back to classes after our pre-internships. Starting off the class we looked at the marks our peers gave us for the dialogue papers. I disagree with a few of the marks that I was given, because I did everything that was asked of me for that assignment. I did like the fact that we got to practice making so many different papers and had the opportunity to read others and their thoughts and opinions as well as the teachers responses to the different questions that were asked. Later in class when we talked about our assessment strategies that we used during our internship I was suprised that not many of my peers used interactive activities to gather understanding of their students knowledge. I used interactive lessons and assessments the entire three weeks as that what is worked for my group of students and their attention spans. I thought that the 5 lenses of data article was interesting and I got lots of information from it. I feel like I am not as far as I want to be on the scale closer to indicative. Throughout my internship I based my things off individual, classroom and the school division. I feel that I did not go in depth and further intro provincial because I did not know exactly where to get the data from, and also my coop teacher never mentioned it at all so I came to the conclusion that maybe it wasn’t super important to look into in my internship where as it will be more important when I have my own classroom and am teaching full time all year long. I will spend the rest of this week and the following week preparing for my interview, I feel that I did a very good job in this class as I handed in everything on time and worked hard on the assignments and participated in class when asked to.

(prepping for interviews)

WEEK 10 (APRIL 10TH) – To start off the class we played a little game about assessment which I really enjoyed. I think that it was very interactive and I had fun doing it. It was similar to a cahoot, which all students love. We then moved onto talking about getting everything ready for our interview. I have everything ready for my interview, I feel that I did a good job in this class as I handed in everything on time, and put a lot of effort into all the assignments. For the dialogue paper I looked over what my classmates gave me, and the average I was not happy with. I feel that I deserve a higher mark as I completed all the criteria that was asked of me. I also think that I did a very good job with my eportfolio, as I had everything in there on time and I think that it was all well done because I put good effort into it and took my time. I was able to fill out all my weekly reflections because I only missed one class as I was out of the country and even then I looked through the agenda and did the things that I would have done in class and spoke with my friends that are also in the class to catch up on anything that I may have missed.