REFLECTIONS ON MY LEARNING PATH
“The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, {the children are now working as if I didn’t exist.}”- Maria Montessori. I never thought that I would be working in the field of education until I had my twins in 2002; that was when I decided to pursue a Montessori certificate. The Montessori philosophy which is based on “following the child”, allows each child to progress at his or her own pace, working independently. I was confused in the beginning; how can I have a classroom of 25 students working on different tasks and progressing at different levels. I did not understand it until I visited a Montessori classroom and sat for two hours just observing children and taking notes. I LOVE IT! Students are working in a well-prepared environment; they are happy and self-directed; they are learning through hands-on and collaborative play; and most importantly, learning is differentiated.
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I have been working in Montessori schools for several years, and I can see how the education system is changing rapidly. The integration of technology, the persisting needs of teachers and students to incorporate innovative teaching and learning strategies, and my passion for learning and leading, pushed me to join the Master of Arts in Education program (MAED) at Michigan State University (MSU). My goals were to gain new knowledge and skills to deliver the best literacy instructions and to coach and train teachers on using new techniques to deliver those instructions.
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Now that I am approaching the end of the program, I can say that every course I took had a great impact on my development as an educator. I am happy and satisfied that I chose literacy as my first concentration area; I work with mostly English Language Learners (ELL), and literacy is their most difficult subject. The Literacy Education courses supplied me with many innovative and creative approaches to literacy teaching. I am more aware of how important it is to enhance literacy teaching across all subject areas, how to analyze reading assessment and set goals for instruction, suggest improvement strategies, and how critical it is to accommodate the needs of different literacy learners. During my MAED program, five of the courses that I took stood out as being influential and crucial in advancing and changing my practices.
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TE 845 (Language Diversity & Literacy Instruction Assessment): This course set the foundation for me in recognizing the needs of struggling readers and writers, especially ELLs. In this course, I had the opportunity to search my own language background. Being an ELL myself and working with ELLs, has allowed me to analyze and understand the individual needs of the students in my kindergarten department. With the increasing number of ELLs across the United States, I discussed with my classmates the important issue about “bilingual classrooms”, and whether they prevent the ELLs from learning the public language.
I strongly agree with the reality that there are many parallels between learning a first and a second language. I strongly agree with Dr. Patricia Ryan in the TED talk that it is good that we have a global language, but this language shouldn’t dominate every aspect of students’ lives. I worked on designing a workshop for teachers of ELLs struggling with giving effective feedback to students’ writings. The workshop addressed teachers of students in grades 3-12, not the students in my department; but I can say that I learned a lot from all the readings that I did. Writing descriptive feedback plays a major role in developing students' writings and thinking skills. The knowledge I gained from TE 845 had a great impact on enhancing the teaching of reading and writing to address the needs of the ELLs.
Another course that influenced me is CEP 842 (Content Area for Students with Mild Disabilities): In every classroom, we might find at least one or more students with Learning Disabilities (LD); learning content area subjects for these students can be very tough. Teachers working with students who have LD can get very frustrated and most teachers either don’t know how to teach them or don’t have enough time to create a separate plan for them. Even though my first concentration is literacy, having seen all the difficulties faced by teachers with LD students, I decide to take counseling courses to learn how to deliver the best instructions to them.
In this course, we discussed the issues in general and special education that affect the education of students with LD in content-area classes. We also described how characteristics and learning needs of students with LD interact with the demands of content area subjects. In this course, I had the opportunity to design a Content-Area Intervention Guide to help teachers of math and science having students with LD. The guide starts with stating the content area that needs to be addressed, the tasks that students with LD must do or learn, and the challenges or difficulties that will impact their success in this content area. The guide also includes intervention strategies that address these challenges. At the end of the guide, I included an assessment strategy to assess students’ learning and development. This course gave me the opportunity to learn about many strategies and tools that I can share with my teachers to help them in setting plans for students with LD. Teachers need to keep in mind that no two students can learn in the same way and that students get bored with the same strategy; they need to keep using new strategies to help further students 'learning.
In CEP 832 (Education Students with Challenging Behaviors), I learned how to handle the psychological and behavioral challenges of students with challenging behaviors. I learned how important it is for teachers to maintain a positive attitude with every student in the class, and to get parents involved in their child’s education. In this course, I examined the behaviors of students who are angry, aggressive, impulsive, shy, withdrawn, low achieving, and failure oriented. Having one student with challenging behavior can ruin classroom management rules. The teacher
needs to know the reason behind the challenging behavior. It could be educational, the student is either a low achiever and the content is very challenging for him, or a high achiever and the content is too easy for him; it could be psychological, or the child might be having troubles at home. Knowing the reason is the first step in correcting the challenging behavior. This course provided great resources and ideas with many templets to use in the classroom. For my final project, I had the opportunity to design a case study about a student in one of the kindergarten classrooms who had a passive-aggressive behavior. During the case study, I observed the student at different times, did some data collection and analysis. I identified the problem, determined the proper intervention plan, worked on the plan, evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies, and reflected on my professional stance toward the student. This course had a great impact on the way I approach students with challenging behaviors; I was very satisfied with the changes I noticed in my stance and I shared what I have learned with my teachers. We need to have tolerance and respect when dealing with these students and always project to them the positive expectations.
Applying differentiation in the classroom can’t be possible without understanding, interpreting, and using meaningful assessment to inform instruction. In TE 842 (Elementary Reading Assessment & Instructions), I had the opportunity to analyze two students’ reading data, interpret their learning needs as readers, set two goals for instruction, and suggest two instruction strategies for each goal. We complete reading assessments in our kindergarten section, but not detailed like the ones we analyzed in this course, and we usually don’t know what to do with the assessment data that we get. I like how the data provided detailed information, like the reading rates, comprehension, background knowledge, and fluency. My view regarding the purpose of reading assessment has changed after this course, I started concentrating more on assessing prior knowledge, and comprehension; I feel that I am now thinking more critically about “why” the student is struggling in certain areas.
The books used in this course provided me with best practices in literacy instruction and best assessment for reading instruction; I know that I have great sources that I can use to provide the best differentiated reading literacy instruction that can lead students to success. I also had the opportunity to participate in a book club discussion with my peers, we read a book called “All About Words: Increasing Vocabulary in the Common Core Classroom, Pk-2”. I chose this book because our students are all ELLs, and teaching vocabulary is one of the hardest subjects for kindergarten teachers. What made this book very helpful and effective is that each chapter provides ample amount of strategies that can be used in the classrooms to deliver the best vocabulary instruction to ELLs. Something very important that I gained from this book, is that we should expose students to many new vocabularies, and not underestimate their abilities to learn new words, young students are able to learn a lot more words if the right process is used. The skills I have learned in TE 842 and the knowledge I gained from reading “All About Words”, have helped me meet the needs of my students more efficiently in order to give them the best instruction possible.
CEP 818 (Creativity in Teaching & Learning) was the most inspiring course that I took. The reason I decided to take this course is that I want to learn how I can include creativity in teaching. I don’t consider myself to be creative, and I find it difficult to inspire my teachers to use creativity in their lesson plans. But CREATE is placed on the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy and it’s needed to develop students’ 21st century skills. The first assignment that I did in the course was to interview a person that I consider to be creative. In the book that we read in this course “Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People" by Robert and Michelle Root-Bernstein, we explored the meaning of creativity and some strategies for developing and nurturing creativity. The book highlights 13 creative thinking tools that are very important for educators to consider applying in the classrooms. These tools are: observing, imagining, abstracting, recognizing patterns,
forming patterns, analogizing, body thinking, empathizing, dimensional thinking, modeling, playing, transforming, and synthesizing. This course helped me to discover that creativity can be learned and nurtured and everyone can be creative in his own way.
I feel very grateful for all the learning I received during my MAED program at MSU, I feel I was given the tools to discover, learn, and grow on my own. Every course that I took, not just the ones mentioned above, had provided me with new ideas, strategies, and resources that I can apply in the classroom and share with my teachers during staff meetings. I am grateful to every project I completed and for every discussion I had with peers; I learned a lot from their feedback and reflections. I also learned from the mistakes that I made, and from the experiences of classmates.
The entirety of the program is what made me a better educator, the application of my learning through case studies dealing with the students in my department had really enticed my experiences. The happiest moments for me were and will always be when I see the fruitful results of my work in students’ outcomes. I feel pleasure when I try something new or figure out a problem. I get excited when I find new educational websites or learn about opportunities to connect with other teachers and students. With the new goals that I set for myself, learning for me will never stop, and I am happy to pride myself to be a lifelong learner.