Reflection Essays
Below you will find a series of essays reflecting upon my time in the Master of Arts in Education program at Michigan State University.
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Please read as I:
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A Year of Growth
As I entered the Master of Arts in Education (MAED) program at Michigan State University in the Spring of 2017 I had many high hopes for myself and my learning throughout the program. I chose to focus on Technology and Learning within the program with the main goal of learning new ways to thoughtfully incorporate the use of technology into my teaching. As I began I knew that technology could be a great tool to help engage and motivate students to learn and I wanted to find the best ways to incorporate it into our daily Kindergarten routine. By learning from the best educators in America, I hoped to discover the best practices across the curriculum and continue to hone my skills to be the best teacher I could be for my students. I believed that this program would help me to keep up in the world of ever changing education and to effectively use technology to support the learning of my students. I can without a doubt say that my expectations and goals have been met and in some areas even exceeded.
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Now that I have completed almost all of the MAED program I have come to realize that my goals stretch so much further than to just effectively incorporate technology into my own classroom. My goals as I move forward are to not only share my knowledge and love for technology with my students in my classroom but also with my colleagues in my elementary building and the rest of our educational community. Throughout this program one of the tasks I enjoyed the most was designing educational opportunities for my grade level peers. I was able to develop professional development opportunities for my colleagues to share with my peers and together we completely revamped the way our grade level teaches our calendar routine. My goal as I move forward is to continue to collaborate with my team to better the educational experience of all kindergarteners in my building. I’ve come to realize that my educational journey includes so much more than just my classroom of 25 kindergartners. My reach as an educator increases exponentially when I reach out and collaborate with other effective educators. Whether I am discussing best practice phonics instruction with my coworker across the hall or reflecting upon an effective social studies lesson with a teacher in Colorado, my goal is to keep communicating and sharing as often as possible. This program has taught me to think and learn outside of the small bubble of my elementary school. I have learned how amazing it is to collaborate with other educators both near and far. While I will continue to work towards my goal of thoughtfully incorporating technology and best practice instruction in my classroom everyday in addition I plan to engage with other educators as much as possible in the process.
Looking Forward
As I continue my journey as a lifelong learner my main goal is to better myself for my students every single day. My students deserve a teacher that is working to be their best self to help them to be their best selves. To reach this goal I have set three specific and attainable goals to work towards in the next year. My professional goals for the next year are to become a technology leader within my elementary building, to increase my participation and collaboration with other educators on social media, and to seek out job opportunities that will further my career as a 21st technology teacher.
Goal #1: Become a technology leader within my elementary building. As the Kindergarten grade level chair in my building I am confident in my leadership skills and my ability to help guide my current kindergarten team to providing a strong foundation for our youngest learners. From here, I want to take my skills I have learned as a leader and use them to lead teachers throughout my building to incorporate technology effectively and purposefully in their own classrooms. In order for our school to continue to grow in our use of technology and our amount of technology tools our entire staff will need to be using these tools in their classrooms authentically. I predict that this effort may provide a challenge for me as I work in a building with many teachers who have expressed their comfort in their current way of teaching and little interest in making changes. I plan to consult Educational Origami’s article with support and strategies for managing complex change in an educational setting. This formula for success, as shown in the image to the left, is crucial when effectively managing such complex change. With this formula as support my goal is to help lead teachers in my building to be comfortable and enthusiastic about incorporating technology into their classrooms everyday.
Goal #2: Increase my participation and collaboration with other educators on social media. In learning from MSU’s experienced and current educators I have found the amazing community of conversations that are happening every single day on social media. Every day on social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter teachers are collaborating on projects, discussing issues in education, and connecting from all over the world for the sole purpose of improving education for our students. My goal as I move forward is to develop my social media platforms to use as a tool to stay current as an educator and to continue my growth. I want to use them to collaborate with educators from near and far. I have created a Twitter and an Instagram for educational purposes and have linked some blog posts that I plan to use to help my platforms be as purposeful as they can be. Currently my social media accounts have been used mostly for assignments and moving forward my goal is to connect with other educators at least three times per week though either my Twitter or Instagram in a way that enhances the educational community.
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Goal #3: Seek out job opportunities that will further my career as a 21st century technology teacher. While I love my career as a Kindergarten classroom teacher, my focus on educational technology throughout the MAED program has opened my eyes to the many career opportunities there are that utilize all I have learned. I have a strong passion for working with students in the classroom but I have discovered that my passion for collaborating and helping other teachers effectively incorporate technology into their classroom is also very important to me. Within the next three years I would like to apply for positions that utilize my experience and passion for leadership and technology within a school setting. While a position like this would be very much out of my comfort zone I feel as though an opportunity like this would give me a chance to develop my leadership skills, encourage other teachers to grow, and most importantly impact student learning in a large number of students. I plan to utilize the MSU’s Master of Arts in Educational Technology’s (MAET), a program closely related to the one I completed, Twitter and Facebook page as they post on opportunities in this field regularly as well as checking postings on the website K12 Jobspot that would fit my description. In order to be considered for these positions I will update my portfolio and supporting documents regularly to remain competitive. My dream would be for my current school to create an educational technology related position that I would be qualified to teach but until then I will continue to seek out opportunities wherever they may be.
The End of a Chapter
As a Kindergarten teacher my goal has always been to work everyday to build and spark the excitement for learning in our youngest learners. Before completing my master’s degree I saw motivation and engagement in the material in being my most important goal and that if I had those everything else for my students would come together on it’s own. I am the first experience with formal school that most of my students have which gives me the responsibility of ensuring that their view of school and learning is a positive one to start their educational journey. As I work to complete my master’s degree this summer I have found that while it is critical to provide a positive foundation and excitement for learning in my Kindergartners, there is so much more that I have a responsibility to provide them with. Many of the skills I learned throughout this degree, most importantly the importance of being an active learner, problem solver, and the importance of working together towards a common goal, are skills that I have since incorporated and encouraged in my students in my classroom. Not only are five and six year olds capable of developing these skills, it is imperative that they do. Throughout my courses within the Master of Arts in Education (MAED) program I developed my own skills as a learner and have since been striving to incorporate these skills into my teaching every day.
One of the most important skills I learned throughout the MAED program is the importance of being an active learner. Reading research articles, textbooks, and attending lectures does not make you a learner. Applying the knowledge, relating it to your position and internalizing and reflecting upon the information is what makes some a learner. I was fortunate enough to develop this understanding during my first semester of the program in the ED 800 course. ED 800 is a course designed to be foundational to the MAED program as a whole and I found that to be very accurate. With the course topic being educational inquiry we discussed philosophy and history of education, classroom-based or teacher research, ethnographic observation with autobiography, biography and history, and theories of the mind and the curriculum. I had to research, reflect upon, and dig deep into the readings and their connected writing prompts independently in order to be successful. Because the course was online I was not able to discuss the information with others which mean I had to truly interpret the information and build connections on my own. I was not able to be successful with only a surface reading of the material. I learned to read closely and actively in order to get a deep understanding of the content. The structure of the course also forced me to take full responsibility for my learning. The course was self paced making it important for me to be use self discipline to complete all tasks in a timely matter. This course not only gave me the foundation in educational inquiry but also taught me how to be a successful active learner throughout the rest of masters courses.
As I developed the skill of active learning personally, it immediately carried over into my Kindergarten classroom as well. As I learned the importance of being an active learner it became something I wanted to instill in my students. I began to incorporate a weekly picture book that we used to practice close reading. I learned in ED 800 that it is important for a reader to revisit a text multiple times through many different lenses to get a full understanding yet when it come to interactive read alouds in our classroom I was reading them only once or twice and not giving my students the opportunity to deeply engage with the texts. In an effort to correct this I began to set aside a time each day where I would read the same book everyday for a week and I would model close reading strategies for engaging with the text fully. In the beginning I model asking questions as I read, pausing or rereading for clarification, and looking up vocabulary words I do not know. We talk a lot about the responsibilities of a reader and that it is their job to monitor their reading to be sure they are understanding it and to push themselves to find meaning and connections in what they are reading. This seems like a lot for five year old emergent readers to grapple with but, through the gradual release of responsibility, by the end of the school year my students were successfully completing close read activities independently that showed their competence in engaging fully with given texts. It has been amazing to see my students grow as learners and readers and to see their independence in close reading grow.
Another course that helped me to grow as a professional and an educator was CEP 817, Learning Technology Through Design. This course taught me the importance of being a problem solver and I learned skills and strategies to effectively solve problems in my professional setting. In the world of education things change constantly and educators must be able to be flexible and able to make necessary changes. We studied the Design Thinking Model from the Stanford Design School and unpacked each step of the model to get a true understanding of the process. Throughout the course I followed the process to attempt a solution to a problem of practice I had noticed in my educational setting. In my building I have noticed time and time again that many teachers don’t utilize the technology that has been given to us and all of the money we spent to get Chromebooks, interactive whiteboards, and other tools sits on the shelf collecting dust. I completed a complete cycle of the Design Thinking Model. in an effort to solve this problem. Through this process I developed a fictitious prototype of a Professional Development session I created to share with teachers in my building designed to teach them to incorporate their interactive whiteboard into their calendar time that has evolved into an actual course I plan to teach to my coworkers this fall. From there I was inspired to use the model to take on problems I notice in my practice and solve them in a consistent and systematic manner.
From the beginning of my teaching career I have strived to make everyday something new for my students and to create lessons and projects that motivate them to want to learn. While I had been attempting to design exciting lessons for my past three years of teaching, I have never had a set plan for how this would look. I typically would find inspiration for a new lesson and would work to put something together that would be effective for my students. While I would put a lot of effort into my work, I often felt as though I came up short and my lessons could have been better. Since taking CEP 817 and learning about the Design Thinking Model from the Stanford Design School I have begun using the process when I am creating lessons for my students. I follow the same steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test and it has made my lessons much more effective. I typically go through this process independently but recently I tried it as my grade level team and I were working on a new social studies unit. I explained to them the design process and we went through it together as we worked on our unit. We all found the process to be helpful in guiding our work and it made us more purposeful. Though the process has more steps than would we would have have gone through in the past, the structure of the design process ultimately saved us time in the end. We were able to put much more thought into our lessons up front which saved us time as we designed and tested our prototype for the lesson. My team and I agreed that we will be using the design thinking model for each lesson we work together to create.
In CEP 832, Educating Students with Challenging Behaviors, we explored effective teaching approaches for students with challenging behavior. We investigated inattention, aggression, academics, and other environmental influences that affect students and their learning. In small focus groups we discussed case studies and developed strategies to help the students and teachers in the case studies we read. In these small groups I found the value and importance of working with others to provide the best opportunities for the fictitious students in the case studies we were reading. My classmates and I learned so much from each other as we worked together and discussed students with challenging behaviors. We worked to listen to each other’s thoughts, add on to their discussion, and create a summary together of our behavior plan for the student. There were many times in our discussions where someone would say, “oh! I never thought of it like that!” or “what a great suggestion!” and I found so much value in being able to learn from my peers. Before this course I always thought poorly of group work due to unsuccessful experiences in prior courses so when I saw that CEP 832 had a group work component I was admittedly nervous. As we began our work together though I was immediately thankful for my group members and the experience we had been provided. While I was able to use my active learning skills from ED 800 to research and learn about best practice strategies to use with students with challenging behaviors it was amazing to have other people to discuss ideas and collaborate with. This course taught me to embrace group work opportunities as well as the importance of working together to move oru students towards success. It also really had me thinking of ways to provide my students with an opportunity to work together like I had.
In CEP 832, Educating Students with Challenging Behaviors, we explored effective teaching approaches for students with challenging behavior. We investigated inattention, aggression, academics, and other environmental influences that affect students and their learning. In small focus groups we discussed case studies and developed strategies to help the students and teachers in the case studies we read. In these small groups I found the value and importance of working with others to provide the best opportunities for the fictitious students in the case studies we were reading. My classmates and I learned so much from each other as we worked together and discussed students with challenging behaviors. We worked to listen to each other’s thoughts, add on to their discussion, and create a summary together of our behavior plan for the student. There were many times in our discussions where someone would say, “oh! I never thought of it like that!” or “what a great suggestion!” and I found so much value in being able to learn from my peers. Before this course I always thought poorly of group work due to unsuccessful experiences in prior courses so when I saw that CEP 832 had a group work component I was admittedly nervous. As we began our work together though I was immediately thankful for my group members and the experience we had been provided. While I was able to use my active learning skills from ED 800 to research and learn about best practice strategies to use with students with challenging behaviors it was amazing to have other people to discuss ideas and collaborate with. This course taught me to embrace group work opportunities as well as the importance of working together to move oru students towards success. It also really had me thinking of ways to provide my students with an opportunity to work together like I had.
While these three courses played a big role in who I am as an educator today, they don’t even scrape the surface of my learning from this program as a whole. It is a very bittersweet feeling closing this chapter in my journey as a lifelong learner. I am so proud of all I have learned and accomplished within the Master of Arts in Education (MAED) program and I will truly miss the community of educators that I have learned from and with. I feel so fortunate to have learned from some of the best instructors in the country and feel confident that I received extremely high quality instruction throughout this degree. With the knowledge I have gained I feel as though I have already put it to great use in my professional life as well as my classroom. This program has made me a stronger, more reflective teacher and I am eager to continue to use my developed skills as I turn to the next chapter in my constant journey of being a lifelong learner.