INTASC Principle 2: Student Development and INTASC Principke 7: Planning

INTASC Principle 2: Student Development and INTASC Principle 7: Planning

While I was not an education major at my undergraduate university, I had the opportunity to take a few developmental psychology classes. In my graduate career I was able to take an Educational Psychology class that allowed me to understand how the things I learned as an undergrad had the ability to affect how I taught my students in the classroom. Our final project in EDP 504, Advanced Educational Psychology, was to further research a topic we had discussed in class throughout the semester. My partner and I chose to research the use of rewards in education. We put together an interactive PowerPoint that could be uploaded onto a webpage so that other educators could learn about how the use of rewards in the classroom could affect students’ learning. I found this project to be very helpful in that I was unfamiliar with how rewards can help support the development of a child’s intellectual, social, and personal development.

http://www.docstoc.com/Docs/447849/Use%20of%20Rewards%

Another class that played a great role in my understanding of how students develop and learn was the Reading in the Content Areas, ECI 541, with Dr. Honeycutt. Much of our time was focused on maximizing metacognition before, during, and after reading. The activities and research we read in that class allowed me to understand how to work with students in order to make sure they fully understand why they are reading, what they are reading, and why they read what they read.

Also, in this class we were required to create a Scaffolding Reading Experience lesson plan as our final project. At first I was intimidated because I was not currently teaching and had no idea how to create a lesson plan. While completing this project I started to become aware of how groups of students become successful in reading. The SRE also allowed me to understand how in my role as a teacher I would have the ability to use this scaffolding technique in order to help students become not only successful in reading, but also how to enjoy the process. The project also allowed me to understand that with struggling readers more scaffolding might be needed in order for that student to be successful.

http://www.docstoc.com/Docs/444262/Political%20Party%20Lesson

During my student teaching experience I was able to get much planning experience. My mentoring teacher allowed me to be creative with the civics and economics class, which gave me the opportunity to do a lot of neat things all while keeping the standard course of study in mind. I soon found out that planning a lesson was harder than I thought. I had to take into consideration the time allotted to that lesson, the students’ abilities, and how much I thought the students could handle in one class period. After the first time Dr. Lee came to observe me in the classroom, he gave me some of the most helpful advice. Due to the block schedule, each class is ninety minutes long, which can seem like an eternity to the students; their attention spans tend to diminish very quickly. Dr. Lee told me that in a class that is ninety minutes long, five to six, activities lasing 15 minutes long would be helpful in keeping the students interested and ready to learn. I tried to implement this technique in the class from there on out, and I found this immensely helped the students stay engaged. When planning my lessons I tried to have 7-8 activities planned just in case one activity did not require as much time or was not as successful and I had hoped. My student teaching experience gave me another opportunity to become familiar with lesson planning and how to implement strategies that are successful.

Understanding how students develop and what needs must be met in order to encourage development is a key to being a successful teacher. Both my graduate coursework along with my student teaching better prepared me to encourage student achievement by working to develop them socially, professionally, and educationally.