I’m feeling a need to prepare for writing application essays and explaining this nearly sudden change in my plans, so this gets to be my brainstorming.
When I was in my teacher prep program during my undergrad days, I had to write a philosophy of teaching for one of my early classes. Mine centered around informal learning, guided discovery, and facilitation. It wasn’t terribly surprising to any of my professors as it kept showing up in class portfolios and such. I was the oddball. I was the one all the teachers thought was wasting her talents by looking toward a career in museum education instead of taking on a classroom.
The simple fact of the matter was, by the time I got to my teacher prep program, I had taught in a museum and a planetarium, and had absolutely fallen in love with it. I loved being able to physically build show and exhibit components, and then introduce people to them. During my teacher prep days, I worked in a museum and an aquarium. I loved doing all sorts of research and developing workshops and tours.
When I was accepted into a museum science graduate program, I thought my heart would just burst. I worked in a training museum with a planetarium attached. I was the only student in the program to have her own office where I sat amidst old dusty astronomy books, video tapes, and old show files to create everything from a show intro to workshops to summer camp activities to teacher guides.
To me, it was the best job in the world!
Sadly, it was a road too short. I was considered “overqualified” before I went to grad school, and it didn’t get any better after that. I interviewed for one Education Director position, but was ultimately rejected because I had no background or interest in fundraising. (At some point, someone is going to have to explain to me what education has to do with fundraising.)
What I most loved about my career as a museum educator is written on a sticky note over my desk to remind me of what makes me happy. Some of it is finding its way slowly into this website. I am happy when I’m researching, when I’m developing curriculum. I can live with low to moderate teaching duties so long as I can get in some training time, too.
My current job is actually perfect in that second respect. I supervise. I support. I teach occassionally. I train fellow teachers. If I do get into grad school on the other side of the country, I want to see if I can just transfer my job (not necessarily at my current level).
It’s missing that whole research and devleopment aspect, though. I really do miss it. This is why my path is taking me into instructional design. Well, that and the fact every job that catches my attention is related to instructional design. I think this is a good match, me creating multimedia learning experiences. It address so many of my needs at once- to create, to research, to develop, to teach!
Posted by Rebecca as Reflective teaching at 7:47 AM EST
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I’m teaching a pilot program prep class for the state standardized test, and one of the biggest problem is that there wasn’t enough material planned for each class meeting.
When we had issues last week, one of the kids suggested a game of Hangman. At first, I wanted to say “no”, but then I quickly saw an opening to turn it into something useful. “Sure,” I agreed, “as long as all the terms are math-related.” My kids weren’t exactly thrilled, but they quickly got into the spirit. They put up the order of operations spelled out. They put up shapes, math facts, vocabulary with definitions. It was amazing to watch.
This week, we were once again short for material in many of the class sections. The first time we needed material, I wrote a series of fractions all over the board, and they took turns going up and creating equivalent ratios. During our next few breaks, I had the students take turns creating problems for each other. Their problems were incredible. They weren’t simple. There was a order of operations problem, a couple solving for x, some factoring and multiplying of polynomials. To end the class, I had them race to fill the board first with prime numbers and then with composite numbers. They were so cute as they corrected each other’s numbers and tried to write a number before a classmate.
I wonder what we’ll do for our last class meeting…
Posted by Rebecca as Teaching methods at 7:40 AM EST
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Mathemagenic shared some interesting links last week.
One of those was this post that compares information architecture to scaffolding. It’s not scaffolding the way we educators tend to think about scaffolding. It’s not talking about accessing prior knowledge and building on it. In this case, it’s talking about scaffolding from a building point of view. How scaffolds allow things to be built, to be supported and strengthened. It’s really an intriguing analogy in the context of social learning.
It then discusses knowledge management in this context. Really…fascinating discussion.
Posted by Rebecca as Knowledge Management, Information Architecture at 8:29 AM EST
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Over the course of the past school year, I’ve been reading a number of blogs that discuss use of technology in their classrooms and school districts. On the one hand, it’s helped me solidify my desire to go to grad school for instructional design. On the other hand, it’s made me start thinking about laboratory classrooms.
When I was doing my teacher prep program, I was in a school that had a laboratory school attached. It was an early childhood center, and those of us who were elementary or secondary people only went over there for kinesthetics. None of us interacted with these students because we were sent out to do field work in the local school districts. This laboratory school was divided into colored rooms that looked like any other preschool, but each colored room had something different they were focused on. Those in the ECE program worked with these students as they honed their own teaching skills.
A school on university grounds announced as a laboratory classroom is one thing. Everyone knows up front that there are going to be experiments conducted.
What about a traditional classroom? Does anyone understand that a normal, standard classroom is a lab, too? What sets teachers apart is the ability to try different attempts to reach their students. Teachers are such a giving, supportive profession that they then take what they’ve experiemnted with, refine it to something reliable, and then share it with other teachers. We don’t think about the fact that our students are guinea pigs in a day-to-day classroom.
This isn’t a bad thing. Incredible things come out of these experimental hot beds. I just think it’s funny to have formal laboratory classrooms when, in truth, all classrooms are laboratory classrooms.
By the way, does anybody have any recommendations for good instructional design graduate programs?
Posted by Rebecca as Teaching methods at 8:16 AM EST
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I’m still thinking about how I learned my teaching skills, and a thought has occurred to me as I watch my students: Does anyone ever walk into a teacher prep program with absolutely zero teaching experience?
It’s been my experience that many who go into teaching have had some practical experience in the matter. It ranges from Sunday School to tutoring fellow students to Scouting projects. In my case, it involved being invited to present some of my project work to students across the school in high school and then moving on to teach in planetaria and natural history museums as a volunteer.
I watch my students in the center, and I can see the beginnings of teaching skill-building going on. A student will drop what they are doing when they realize another student is having trouble understanding a concept to try to help them out. We don’t encourage the dropping of what is being worked on, but oftentimes the other student can say just the right thing to help things connect in the first student’s mind.
I did a lot of peer teaching in school. I’ll never forget the day i sat there teaching a classmate multiplication (a year ahead of when we were supposed to learn it) in elementary school. I was asked to tutor my fellow computer science students in high school. I was peer taught physics in high school
I fully support peer teaching because it benefits both the student teaching and the student being taught. It brings the teaching down to the student’s level if you’re having a hard time getting there, and it reinforces the concept for the one teaching.
(Here’s an interesting post on peer teaching.)
Are there ever actually people who honestly walk into a teacher prep program without a single drop of teaching experience?
Posted by Rebecca as Reflective teaching at 7:48 AM EST
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I’ve been thinking about how I learned to teach over the past few days. If you look at my resume, you’ll notice that I had some teaching experience before I ever set foot in a teacher preparation program.
As I sat there teaching Saturday morning, I started thinking about how I learned to manage a class, to teach in multiple modes, teach to a wide variety of age groups. I don’t know that I ever really gave it much thought when it was happening, but I learned it through teaching opportunities in high school and volunteer jobs in college.
I’m sitting here trying to decide what to do with myself, and every time I think about trying to write a personal statement for a grad school app, I can’t help but remeber how easily my perosnal statement for the Museum Science program at Texas Tech went. Ultimately, the degree ended up a culminating project short, but I think it would have been successful under different circumstances.
It was easy to write about being a museum educator because I was in the full grip of it. I’d love to be back doing it. No longer hireable for pointless reasons, I now think about what it was in the museum education world that I loved. In short, I loved the challenges, the lessons learned practically. I loved developing curricula that could be tweaked to various audiences. I loved interacting with people across various demographics.
How does one translate that into a new career direction?
Posted by Rebecca as Reflective teaching at 7:37 AM EST
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We spend time with our students in the center trying to educate them on why Wikipaedia should never be a primary resource in an academic paper. Actually, that’s not fair. We try to explain what Wikipaedia is and why it is not always a credible source, and therefore should never be the sole support for the research in an academic paper.
The kids fuss, and we expect that since we’ve just asked them to do some real work and to read what they’re finding critically.
Of course, the argument then becomes why we support an often out-of-date source, like the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, over a site that is edited frequently by people theorteically trying to improve the level of knowledge on the subject.
Again, the best we can do is try to educate them to read everything with a critical eye. We try to explain the inherent problems with completely trusting a source that is open to anybody editing it. We try to explain the need for other sources to help corrborate what they’re finding an Wikipaedia.
I use Wikipaedia very rarely, but when I do, you can bet I’m running around finding up to half a dozen other sources to supoort or correct what I’ve found there.
Posted by Rebecca as Components of Learning, Current Affairs at 7:38 AM EST
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I think I’ve mentioned that I love to teach through questioning. My kids know this, and expect this. THey think they even have my questioning system down, but I like to change things up sometimes to keep them on their toes.
They’re going through a shake-up period right now, and I’m proud to say most of them are handling it just fine because they understand why I’ve changed my questioning strategy.
Here’s a questioning toolkit recently shared at elearningpost. I love it! It’s actually giving me ideas of other ways to question my students to help direct their learning!
Let’s hope my students are as excited as I am!
Posted by Rebecca as Teaching methods at 8:24 AM EST
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I’ve been thinking a lot about MySpace lately. The blogosphere looks at it and declares the sky to be falling. Schools block it because students are being approached by unsavory characters through it and assaulted. I haven’t heard yet if there have been any abductions or murders resulting from one of these approaches, but I suspect they’re coming. The schools, I’m sure, are also now up in arms after a student’s plans to attack his high school were found in his MySpace blog.
In short, MySpace has received a lot of bad press lately. Is it evil? I’m not sure. I do have an account, created for me by a colleague because she didn’t want to surf alone, but I’ve often been annoyed at how limited I feel it is.
I can say, from my own experience, that MySpace seems to be fairly decent for indie performers trying to launch themselves. So far, I’ve been introduced to a handful of not terrible bands and an almost funny, yet clueless stand-up comic. I know there are libraries experimenting with MySpace to share their services and collections, and eagerly await the results.
It makes me wonder if perhaps there is a potential use for MySpace as a means to deliver learning chunks to digital natives. I think I’d need to experiment more with the site’s structure to see what I can make the system do.
Posted by Rebecca as e-learning at 7:33 AM EST
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I think I must have been such an odd student growing up. I was never the student who asked why I had to learn something. I was the one who took on side research projects, just to satisfy my curiosity. I’ve always just loved learning.
If this post from the Connectivism blog is any indication, that would mean I see learning more as the journey. My favorite teachers, then and now, are still the ones who graded based on what you attempted instead of what you missed.
When we focus on the leare ning itself, I think we create a culture where a love of learning can be achieved, thereby creating people who become lifelong learners. To make everything about the result of the learning creates people, in my own opinion, will always have a hard time enjoying any journey. They’ve been so imprinted with this need to get to the end of something that they forget to enjoy what leads to that result.
That trip is more often than not what makes the result so enjoyable and creates the memories, and I think that’s why I view learning as a journey. I enjoy learning. I have so many anecdotes that take place while I was researching something because I’m unafraid to explore tangents…dirt roads in my learning experiences, if you will… For me, learning is like one big road trip.
Posted by Rebecca as Components of Learning at 8:19 AM EST
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