"And just like that it's over. We tend to our wounded and count our dead." - Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton Well, this is it. The FINAL blog of my graduate school career. I have spent the last two weeks in a very reflective mood. I was thinking about my last minute (a day before the first class) decision to jump on the Touro Train. I am very glad that I did.
Perhaps it is only in building all the pieces of my website that I really understood how far we've traveled. All the little pieces I've added to the LIL are snapshots of the hard work and learning that has taken place. When I started putting the website together, it seemed an impossible task with far too many empty spaces to fill. Now, as I work on polishing it, and on my final presentation screencast, I can't seem to find a way to squeeze everything in. There are far too many stories, experiences and lessons to fit into a website or into a brief video. My reaction to these final assignments is one that I want my students to have as they come to the close of a project. I want them to reflectively look back and understand how much they have accomplished and how very far they have traveled. This might be a pretty big undertaking for 7 year olds. I really appreciate how this process, beginning with research and then moving forward has caused me to be very thoughtful about what happens within my classroom. It isn't enough to come up with carefully prepared lessons, I must evaluate and analyze those lessons based on the outcome. I might be aiming to teach my students how useful and effective computer science can be, but I need to assess whether or not that is what they have gained in my classroom. An effective teacher is in a constant research loop - designing, testing and redesigning. But it is not the students we are testing, but rather our lessons. As I design my website, I am always finding places where I can increase clarity and/or make overall improvements. Like the craft of teacher, I am in a constant state of self-evaluation. Good teaching involves self-evaluation that is always running in the background of every lesson, and this model will hopefully lead our students to become more self-reflective themselves as they determined their own levels of learning and understanding.
2 Comments
Nancy
12/5/2017 05:53:01 pm
Jen,
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Patrick
12/7/2017 02:19:39 pm
Even though our Master's projects are coming to a close, I don't feel like we are done yet! The semester might end and presentations will happen and grades will go in but I feel like our capstones are never really "done." It is a constant state of updating and re-evaluating and expanding. We could keep building on these websites forever. It makes finding some closure around this hard. As we frantically prepare our video presentations, I can't help but think of all the extra things that could go on my different pages. A 7 minute finale just doesn't feel like it holds everything we have done or even do justice to the all the things we want to continue to do.
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AuthorJen has been teaching school for awhile now. She's learned some stuff, but she's got tons more to learn. Archives
October 2017
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