December 8, 2012

Goals for PSII

My biggest achievement in PS1 was establishing a positive relationship with my
students. This relationship carried over into all of my lessons and students immediately
showed me respect and trusted me. Since this plays such a huge role in a classroom,
establishing positive relationships with my students[h) the importance of respecting
students human dignity. They know how to establish, with different students,
professional relationships that are characterized by mutual respect, trust and harmony]
will be my most important goal. Practicums go so fast so I will aim to have learned all
the students names in the first day and then I will strive to find some interests that the
students have to integrate into my lessons.
Another goal that I have is to develop better questioning strategies[i) there are
many approaches to teaching and learning. They know a broad range of instructional
strategies appropriate to their area of specialization and the subject discipline they
teach, and know which strategies are appropriate to help different students achieve
different outcomes]. I was good at getting students to understand some lower level
thinking however, getting them to think on a higher level was difficult to achieve with the
questions I developed for them. An important part of this is to just let conversations go
sometimes because you can ask students to evaluate each others responses and this
will immediately bring them up the evaluation level of Blooms Taxonomy. I am able to
get students to understand concepts but now I will strive to get them to think on a
deeper level.
December 8, 2012
My other goal for PSII is to develop strategies for explaining the same
concept in different ways [(i) there are many approaches to teaching and learning.
They know a broad range of instructional strategies appropriate to their area of
specialization and the subject discipline they teach, and know which strategies are
appropriate to help different students achieve different outcomes]. This comes in with
differentiating instruction. Some students may struggle with a certain way to perform a
math problem but this does not mean that they do not understand what needs to be
done. They are just struggling with the way to solve the problem. Its my job as the
teacher to get my students to reach their full potential and I believe an important step in
this is to help them develop different strategies for solving problems.