EDU-6920: Education Research

Guiding Question: How can data collection and analysis improve my practice? Data collection and analysis are key tools in fully understanding everything that happens and how your students are learning. While I was using these tools in my dance teaching classroom and not in a school classroom, I found it important to try using these tools in this environment because it is so much harder to collect data in a dance classroom where the students often do little to no writing. What I was able to look at was keeping more reflection journals and including […]

EDU-5026: Partnering with the Adolescent Learner

Guiding Question: What is the role of a teacher in a secondary learning-centered environment? In a word, I would say that the purpose of a teacher is to be a guide. You are quite literally guiding students through their year(s) in your classroom. You have all the necessary tools and research to back them up and push them to explore the world around them. The real trick is that as a guide, you are pushing them to take an interest. You have to be careful that you don’t over push to the point of teenage […]

EDU-6630: Critical Practitioner

Education is the basis for creating a society that knows how to advocate for itself. In order to do that, we have to push our students to think outside the box, to know what their own limits are, and to have the resources to push for a better tomorrow. Of course, when I put it that way, it sounds a wee bit like I’m pushing the June Rebellion of 1832. “Do you hear the people sing” indeed. But I digress. If this course has given me anything, it would be background knowledge that allows for […]

EDU-5011: Educational Studies

I have always known the importance of personal experience in the classroom. For a long time, for me, that personal experience usually related to passion for the content area that you are teaching. The more you experience and learn about the subject you are teaching, the more passionate you become about that subject area, the more passionate your teaching of that subject will be. As true as that is, there is so much more to teaching than just that. There is the fact that every student who ever enters your classroom will be different, will […]