October 5, 2017

EDUC 350...

This week in EDUC 350, we had Dr. Mitcham come talk to us about Special Education, Multi-Tiered System Support (MTSS), Response to Intervention (RTI), and Team-Initiated Problem Solving (TIPS). (Wow, that's kinda information overload!)
With MTSS, we learned about the different tiers. There's Tier 1, which is Differentiated Core. Everyone participates in the regular core curriculum in the classroom, but many students need differentiation. 80-85% of students are in Tier 1. Tier 2 is Supplemental Support/Enrichment. This is "core plus more," and 15-20% of students are in Tier 2. Lastly, there's Tier 3, which is Intensive Support/Targeted Curriculum Extensions. About 5% of students are Tier 3. After Tier 3, those that don't benefit from the Tiers go to Special Education. Those in Special Education have Individualized Education Plans (IEP's).
There were a few key points that I took from Dr. Mitcham's visit, and they really stood out to me. I enjoyed the important information that she provided, but what I most enjoyed was the advice she gave us about teaching in general. These key points were:

• A teacher needs to fix behavioral problems first, and then academic problems. However, the teacher needs to make sure that these behavioral problems are actually behavioral, and not stemming from frustration from an underlying academic problem.
• Children are like oysters. They will only open up when they are ready, and if you're not there for them when they finally decide to open up, they will just shut again.
• We teach children. We need to remember this. The content that we provide them is important, but in the end it's only content. We need to teach kids.
• The paycheck isn't why we teach. The paycheck is the result of teaching. The "why" is our own personal reasons. {My own personal reasons: It's my calling and my passion, I want to help children, I love kids... I could literally go on and on about all the reasons why I want to teach.}
• ALL children can learn. Just because a child comes from poverty absolutely does not mean that they aren't as smart as a rich kid. The difference can simply be that the child from poverty was not introduced to as many things (like books) as the child coming from wealth.
• The bulk of my time will not be spent lesson planning. It will be spent problem solving.

All of these key points are related to many of the North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards. I think that they mostly relate to Standard 2a, "Teachers provide an environment in which each child has a positive, nurturing relationship with caring adults." I will integrate ALL of these key points into my future classroom because I think that they are all so SO important.

EDUC 410...

We talked a lot about Formative Assessment specifically in this class this week. In one of the Frontline assignments for this class this week, there was a video about a teacher who was frustrated because she had specific students that were so smart and knew all of the material, but they were not doing well on their tests and other assessments. She KNEW that they knew this material. So she came up with a strategy for helping them do their own assessment data, getting their parents more involved, and helping the students learn to take responsibility for their own learning. This new strategy was Student Led Conferences. Each student had their own binders with their goals, data of improvement, and evidence of this improvement. Their evidence was graded work that they completed. Each student met with their parents and teacher, and explained to their parents and teacher their goals, how they reached them, and their data as well as evidence supporting this data. I thought this idea was golden. I definitely plan to implement this in my classroom. This aligns with Standard 2e, "Teachers work collaboratively with the families and significant adults in the lives of their students." It also relates to Standard 5a, "Teachers analyze student learning." Lastly, it also related to Standard 3d, "Teachers make instruction relevant to students."

For my outside research this week, I read about formative assessment on Carnegie Mellon University's website. It says that formative assessments "help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work." I think the key point of this statement is that formative assessments help students to target areas that need work. This helps students to take responsibility for their own learning.

Source: https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/assessment/basics/formative-summative.html