Annotated Transcript
Below you will find a list of the courses I have taken during my graduate studies at Michigan State University.
TE 802- Reflection & Inquiry in Teaching Practice I
Fall 2012
Instructor: Denise Acevedo
This course was taken during the first semester of my internship year and involved a lot of reflection on classroom experiences. This course was an integral part of my student teaching because it allowed me to apply research-based best practices in the classroom with my students I was working with in my urban setting, and allowed opportunity to reflect upon my teaching with my professor's feedback, as well as my peers. This involved planning units of study, teaching in the classroom, revising lesson plans, designing formative and summative assessments, aligning to Common Core Standards, and exploring differentiation through modifications and extensions. This course helped shape the teacher I am today because it allowed me opportunities to practice, reflect, receive feedback, and improve on my teaching over time.
TE 803- Professional Roles & Teaching Practice II
Spring 2013
Instructor: Sean Williams
This class was taken during the second semester of my internship year and this was another important class that helped shape the teacher I am today because it involved a lot of deep learning about what a school culture involves. It helped me to understand the different roles in school district, my responsibilities as a teacher, and the day-to-day problems that can affect the way a school day is run. This included strategies for effective classroom management, building a classroom culture, making connections to colleagues, and other ways to get involved in the school community. This also taught me about parent communication skills, teacher accountability, and strategies for teaching students with a variety of risk factors. Overall this helped me to become a much stronger teacher and a more involved teacher in the school community.
Instructor: Dr. Rochelle Rubin
TE 804- Reflection & Inquiry in Teaching Practice II
This course built upon my TE 803 course in that it also took place during my student teaching and involved a lot of reflection. However, this course involved a bit more independence and inquiry on my part in the classroom. Rather than being guided through best practices and reflecting in class, we were given readings and it was up to us to apply these best practices in our classrooms. This helped foster independence and professionalism in my own teaching. I believe this also helped me to build my teaching craft. The reflection in the classroom became much more diverse from peer to peer as we learned from one another's successes and failures. Our professor was able to step back and become more of a facilitator of these conversations as we reflected on our own inquiry. It was after this course that I truly felt prepared to take on my own classroom.
ED 800- Concepts of Educational Inquiry
Summer 2016
Instructor: Dr. Steven Weiland
This course was my first course that I took when coming back to my masters program at Michigan State. This was a great course to remind me of some of the issues in education and how to address these problems of theory and practice. The issues ranged from philosophies to leadership to cultural influences to teaching and learning. This course was designed to be self-paced and involved six different types of educational inquiry. The final paper was a reflection of my own learning using narrative inquiry. Overall, this course helped me to see and understand that learning does not just occur in one way, and that sometimes the deepest learning can come from an experience. My favorite book and paper that I wrote was based on The Girl With the Brown Crayon by Vivian Paley. I really connected to this book due to the story surrounding a little girl in a preschool setting and how their inquiry was so developmentally appropriate, yet so deep. This was a great course to kick-start my masters program.
TE 842- Elementary Reading Assessment & Instruction
Instructor: Dr. Laura Tortorelli
This course was a great refresher in the area of reading assessment. Because my district had a set of requirements for reading assessment, it had been a while since I was using other forms of assessment. This gave me the opportunity to explore other assessment forms and how they might be helpful in informing my instruction for my readers. The course also came with a required assessment book that contained a variety of assessments in the areas of comprehension, fluency, decoding, sight words, phonics, and phonemic awareness. This course explained each assessment in depth, as well as gave me the chance to analyze student assessments and decide what best practices would best meet the needs of these children. This course helped me grow as a reading teacher and see the value in using a variety of assessments to inform my reading instruction.
TE 843- Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners
Instructor: Dawnmarie Ezzo
The primary focus of this course was differentiation in the area of literacy. Much of the work in this course involved lectures in different aspects of literacy and then application of these best practices with our literacy learner. All of this work went into our Literacy Learner Analysis Project which involved working with a literacy learner one-on-one once per week. We studied about the literacy profile of the child and how factors such as motivation, family, and language can influence the literacy development of a child. I was able to use assessments to plan for tutoring sessions that directly met the need of my student. At the end of the course, I wrote a 16 page analysis of my literacy learner, the lessons I had taught, her assessments, and where to go next with this child. This really helped strengthen my reading teaching skills.
CEP 816- Technology, Teaching and Learning Across the Curriculum
Fall 2016
Instructors: Dr. Binbin Zheng & Diana Campbell
This was one of my favorite courses taken in my masters program because it involved exposure to many different types of new media technology and tools. We had the chance to use these tools in meaningful ways that related back to the readings or lessons that we had each week. This was a model of technology integration in meaningful ways. For this course, many assignments included using new media technology and tools to recreate and redesign lessons in our own classrooms. I really liked that I was able to use my work from the course to better my practices in the the classroom. The final project involved the redesign of a unit to make it more engaging for learners using technology. This was a unit that I shared with my colleagues and we plan to use for years to come.
Instructor: Cui Cheng & Carmen Richardson
CEP 818- Creativity in Teaching and Learning
I always thought of myself as somewhat creative, but always believed that either people were born creative or not. In this course we explored cognitive tools that fostered creativity. Then, we used what we learned to do some sort of creative assignment that we would blog about on our websites. We would reflect on our creativity and comment on one another's work to help strengthen our use of these cognitive tools. This course was very unique and it helped me to see things very differently. It also helped me to foster creativity in my students through meaningful projects and the use of their own cognitive tools.
CEP 816- Technology & Leadership
Spring 2017
Instructors: Dr. Aman Yadav & Spencer Greenhalgh
This course has been the first leadership course I have taken and I really enjoyed it. We learned a lot about taking people through a change process, different strengths and weaknesses of various leadership styles, how to create a vision and effectively lead people through this change, ethical and social implications of technology, professional development, and the importance of relationship building.
ED 870- Capstone Seminar
Instructors: Dr. Matthew Koehler, Aric Gaunt, & Spencer Greenhalgh
Creating my own professional online portfolio was a great experience. Not only was I able to learn some new skills in website creation, but I was able to truly summarize and reflect on my time in the MAED program at Michigan State. Whether I was working on my resume, creating my showcase of my favorite pieces of work, reflecting on goals, or setting new goals I was consistently reflecting and collaborating with my peers. This was a great culmination of the hard work I have done in my masters program and has created a place for me to collect artifacts that I can have with me throughout my professional career.