The Sum is Greater than the Pieces.

Kellie, Emily, and I had a wonderful, crazy week putting together our first group presentation on Methods for Closure and Evaluation. Our groups for this assignment were put together just as we were about to go out the door during our last class. Kellie, Emily and I quickly traded email information and acknowledged that we all were booked up for a few days. We left class, somewhat apprehensive about how we were going to pull this together. Amazingly, putting together the 20 minute presentation on Closure and Evaluation using Direct Instruction worked better than I expected.

It was obvious during the short days that we worked together that my two partners were completely invested in putting some strong effort into creating a presentation that was informative and engaging. Flexibility, peer support and dialog strengthened our end product, as well as our entire experience. This was definitely an example of how the three of us working together were able to create a better product than if each of us had worked separately and later put it together.

This is again a lesson I would like to bring to my classroom, not only the ability to work together, but to do it so that the end product benefits from a collaborative environment. This would involve learning to listen and to speak up, to look for and use the strengths of each of your teammates, and to support and constructively critique each other.

There is always more...

to learn. This is my second time through a Methods class. As part of my initial pursuit of a Secondary Education degree, I had taken a Methods class a few years ago. Due to that class, I became fairly comfortable writing objectives. But there is always more to learn. I did forget that "the student will be able to" is not part of a viable objective because of its lack of measurability. I found that, because of their specificity, the list by Heinich, Molenda, Russell, and Smaldino (2001) of 100 suggested verbs for use in writing objectives clarified the task of writing objectives.

The third week of class brought many more learning points. What exactly is a model, a strategy, a method? My professional vocabulary was not where it should be.

After much reading, and direct instruction in class, I am beginning to learn the differences and the types. I am hoping that through this class, I will gain a thorough enough understanding of how to utilize the various types of models, strategies and methods within a lesson in order to plan the most effective lessons for my students.

Why are we doing this??

Because time is generally a rare commodity these days, I tend to evaluate everything I do in terms of time worthiness. I know that Dr. S. puts alot thought into everything she asks us to do, but when I saw the tee-shirt project, I thought, "Well, this looks like fun, but will I get enough out of it, given the time it will take me to complete it?".

I figured that a goal of the project might be to give us more exposure to and experience with technology. It would also give us a lesson component that we could modify and transfer to our classroom. The presentation of our tee-shirt project would allow us to practice our classroom presentation skills and build community early on in our semester. However, it also forced us to think about who we are as educators and face up to our anxieties concerning this profession.

As with most education projects (but not all), I did get much more out of it than I expected. Of course there was the pride of trying a new task and having a finished product that I was fairly happy with. Not that it was a beautiful tee shirt. But it does represent my attempt at something new, not giving up when I encountered bumps, and it represents some new thinking on my part. I am hoping that I can encourage these goals in my own classroom. I hope I remember that the act of actively learning is to be applauded, at least as much as content knowledge.