This has been an amazing semester. I have received so much knowledge on education through my foundations block, and this small blog post is not enough to show how much I have learned this semester.However, I will try and touch on a few of the many things that I have learned.
I would first like to talk about how my views of a good teacher have changed this semester. Before coming into the foundations block, I thought that good teachers were the ones that made the material the most presentable to their students. However, this view has been radically changed after taking these classes this semester. I now realize that good educators are the ones that can help their students think about creative/innovative ways in which to implement their material into the real world. Teaching is much more than just having students remember a bunch of material and have them recite it back to the teacher. There is no purpose of knowing any information if you cannot use it in creative and practical ways. This is sadly how many of the teachers in our education system teach right now, which is something that I really hope to change when I become a teacher.
Reflecting back the teaching standards we received at the start of the year, I really want to talk about standard #8, which is “Teachers know how to test for student progress”. I feel that teachers currently do not assess the true knowledge of their students, rather what information they can recite back to the teacher. This sort of knowledge is not practical at all, yet that is all that educators are assessing for in our current system of education. A really different and effective way of assessment that I learned about, in which I hope to assess my students, is project-based learning. Project-based learning really helps put students in positions to apply these concepts that they are learning about in class, into creative/innovative ways outside of the classroom. This should be what educators are really assessing for, and I feel that project-based learning helps to assess for these important skills that we should be teaching our students.
As I reflect back on this semester, I think the biggest thing I have learned from these classes, is how multi-faceted education is. Before going into these classes, I had no idea about all of the inter workings that are involved in education, as well as how many problems are currently in education. After this semester, I realize that there is so much that goes into being a teacher, especially in order to become a good teacher. As a future educator, I hope to become more knowledgeable and cognizant of all of the pedagogical practices, and problems that are involved in education in order to become the best teacher that I can be.
As I think about my online identity as an educator one day, I hope that I can look for more ways in which to process/synthesize all of these ideas that I am being taught, in order to make myself into a good and effective educator one day. It has been amazing to have become so much more enlightened about the education role this semester, and I am excited for all that I am going to learn in my classes to come.