5389 Contribution to Learning

When I first started courses these 8 weeks I was stressed out. I had just started one of my dream jobs (Special Education teacher), and I was already getting behind on my courses. Thankfully, I have great and understanding professors who allowed me extra time to get back on track. I am now in my first year of full time teaching my own class, and I am a semester away from graduating with my masters. My ADL courses this semester allowed me to really think about the environment I am creating for my students and if its significant enough for them to properly learn, grow, and feel confident and comfortable.

5313 was all about learning how to create safe, effective, collaborative environments for my students. With me being a SpEd teacher, I through in safe because with my students having certain disabilities I want to always make sure I have a safe environment for everyone. This course had me reflect and evaluate my ability to be a self-driven and self-directed learner and assess my contributions to learning for my students. Even though I am a teacher, I am also still a learner. This course taught me how to assess the quality of my own work and to be a powerful learner, this is a very important part when planning lessons for my students.

5389 was mostly about CSLE with your team and demonstrating/ modeling them. This course allowed me to focus on the learning that is actually given to me for FREE during professional developments. I found ways to make professional developments more fun and engaging. I found ways to not just have everyone in the same room but instead to give them options and then to reconnect what they learned with other peers. The course taught me that just like students, teachers do not want to sit and be lectured to. Nancy Duarte's message should have spoken volume to all educators who want to succeed during and after PL. By overcoming ineffective communication, the ideas that live in us should be shared with everyone on your team if you know it will benefit the students.

I enjoyed both courses this semester fully. I believe I blogged more for these two courses than I did for any of the other ADL courses. For 5389 I am giving myself a score of an 88. I chose the score range of 80-89.5 because even though I started off rough, I finished really strong. I didn’t utilize my classmates as much as I know I should have, and wasn’t able to provide feedback for some activities. I chose 88 because I did do additional postings, and provided some resources to my peers to use for their ePortfolio.