Teaching PhilosophyNothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting our eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted. - Garrison Keillor |
At the core of my beliefs on teaching and learning is that what we do is important for our students and communities. Parents and the community are our strongest allies in the education process of our students and every child has the right to learn and a quality education. Students that enter the classroom should feel safe, valued, and contribute to a positive learning environment. Teachers should be aware of student emotional, social, psychological and physical development in addition to cognitive growth. A genuine interest in students is a must for any teaching/learning relationship and individualized instruction is essential in supporting children with different preferences. In order to meet varied student needs incorporating a variety of approaches; differentiated instruction, case methods, flipped classrooms, summarizing, formative and summative assessments and reteaching are all pliable instruction tools. Ongoing professional development, collaboration with peers, and data-based research create strong teaching communities. When considering what is best for our students, I believe effective teaching communities have students who thrive.
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U.S. Studies Classroom Wiki & Syllabus |
Lesson Plans |
Before Euclid had learning management systems, I actively sought resources to support teaching and learning. Wikis have been a huge support in teaching content with technology and student technology-based projects. Classroom wiki, link to syllabus.
Classroom ManagementLearning Management
The opportunity to teach with a class set of Chromebooks was supported by the use of Haiku Learning and Google Apps. I loved that I could translate assignments for a French speaking student with Google Translate, the Chromebooks, and my Haiku Learning site. Haiku Learning was a great resource for content assessments, student publishing, guided research, and student posts/discussions. Another district resource that provided valuable data was Mastery Connect. Mastery Connect provided instant assessment feedback with individual student, class, or teacher performance indexes linked to content standards. Using Google Docs the Social Studies team created common standards-based assessments and used student data to pinpoint concepts that needed revisiting. This provided us with opportunities to share best-practices, improve curriculum, and help students to master content standards. What I found limiting was using different resources for maintaining grades, publishing grades, analyzing student performance, aligning content, and content management. In the end it's difficult to argue with results as the Social Studies team saw steady improvements in standardized assessments. Classroom Management Creating a learning environment is key for productive classroom. When student problems emerge the goal is to deal with them quickly and respectfully. Student conferences, communication with parents, and other colleagues typically resolve most classroom disruptions. Classroom Management Resources
Additional Lesson Plans
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Student WorkSocial Issue Research/iMovie Project
Designed to teach students how to research, create and support a thesis, and publish their work as a movie. Students enjoy this project and classes love sharing movies with peers. Ideally a learning management system (Moodle, Haiku, Black Board) that would enable hosting student productions would extend the lesson enabling students to evaluate, post, and expand dialogue on student led topics. While YouTube can be informative, student work isn't typically posted as a classroom resource. Host of student project on YouTube is for professional use only.
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