ED 640

A friend and colleague shared this cartoon with me this week, which I think is so pertinent to what I've learned this semester in grad school. Throughout this semester, I've learned about various methods used by teachers to both engage students and enrich their experiences in the STEM classroom. However, I have also been made aware of the various limitations my students face. Those limitations could be related to a child's cognitive or physical abilities, or could be attributed to the child's level of interest in the material being taught. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a pedagogy that strives to reach all students by offering them multiple means of expression, representation, and engagement. Teachers can provide a variety of methods for students to gain knowledge, show what they know, and interact with the subject matter. Even though STEM tends to be a high-interest subject and technology tends to be a great equalizer in the classroom, I can still use the ...

Two weeks ago, my colleagues and I embarked on our yearly overnight trip for Outdoor School with our sixty 7th graders. Although this was my fourth time chaperoning the field trip, I feel like every time I go, I learn something new about myself, and my students. In reflecting on this event and my recent studies in grad school, I couldn't help but be reminded of Charlotte Danielson's Framework for evaluating teacher performance. Which aspects of the field trip had I been the most successful at, and which needed improvement? I knew that since our field trip was not traditional classroom teaching, that there would not be direct matches between every aspect of the Framework and my experience, but I thought it might be a good exercise to evaluate what I did do that happened to follow the Framework. 1e. Designing Coherent Instruction Teachers should carefully plan engaging and challenging instructional activities that conform to the prescribed standards. "The sequence o...

My 7th grade students have recently prepared for and completed a frog dissection. To prepare the students for the task, we created frog dissection paper dolls, took notes on the body systems of the frogs, and practiced labeling the frog's’ internal anatomy. This is one of the units that all of my 7th graders look forward to with excitement, dread, or a mix of both in the weeks and days leading up to the actual dissection. At last, the day of the actual event arrives and my students are buzzing around the room finding their goggles and aprons as the time to commence the task draws closer. Let me tell you how I saw this classroom activity affect one of my students this year. One student (I’ll refer to him as Student A) has struggled with my class all trimester. He recently disqualified for special education services for his ADHD and he and I have both had trouble adjusting to this new arrangement. As his science teacher, I know that he did perform better on certain tasks with...

Reflective Blog 1 ED 640 This week in ED 640 we learned about Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Differentiated Instruction (DI) which are both approaches to teaching and learning that help educators create student engagement by offering teachers choice in how to impart knowledge and offering students multiple ways to express what they have learned. In my own classroom, it is important to me to have variations in teaching and learning - without it we would all be quite bored! One of the most dreaded (read: boring) learning tasks in middle school science is vocabulary. Teachers generally don’t like teaching it and students don’t enjoy learning it. As an experienced 7th-8th grade science teacher, I know that my students are expected to master 1000+ new vocabulary words per year in each of my classes, so I have developed my own methods over the years to vary instruction and keep my students engaged, or at the very least awake during my vocabulary lessons. According in Y...