Focus on Change and the Future

1.  What changes are emerging from your new learning and classroom application?

Based on my learning, I've been more open to trying new things in the classroom. I'm more aware of my teaching style and trying to differentiate in the classroom more. As things work, I take notes on them to remember for "next time" and if things don't work, I fix the lesson right away, taking notes on what to improve, and that way it's ready for next time. This is helpful instead of trying to remember what did or didn't work next year when I'm teaching the curriculum again.

2. What new thinking is occurring as a result of our group dialogue around practices and research?

Several things are occurring for me based on our group dialogue. The importance of reflecting on work that students accomplish and having students review each other's work and provide feedback. 

3. How is our sharing influencing, supporting, and challenging us to focus on concepts and student learning?

Based on what we discuss in class, I gain insight and ideas to implement in the classroom. I try new things and focus on student learning. I also focus more on building student relationships. This has been extremely helpful with my high school class and the students are learning extremely high level information and doing well.

4. What additional changes are you striving for?

I'm striving to implement Blogger more in the classroom and have students provide feedback on each other's Bloggers. I also want to implement for community building activities specifically in my 8th grade classes where students struggle more with working well together.

Golden Circle Process

Why - I teach engineering because I love being able to build and create things with my mind and my hands, and I want to share this love with students to pique their interests about becoming future engineers.

How - I use PLTW curriculum to teach engineering concepts. I teach project-based engineering concepts.

What - I teach pre-engineering classes to grades 8-12. The 8th grade engineering class focuses on protoyping. The 9th grade class focuses on engineering design. The 10-12th grade class focuses on civil engineering and architecture concepts. I believe that engineering ties in multiple content areas and helps students understand the connection between what they are learning in school and how it ties in with the real-world.


Reflection:

How do I teach "from the inside out"?

I am passionate about every topic I teach and show that excitement in my body language, voice, facial expressions. I use examples in my classes from my work as a civil engineer. I talk about my family and their engineering and architecture experiences. I bring in speakers that are engineers to share their experiences.

In what specific ways does what you believe inform and impact how you teach?

I emphasize the information that I know is important in class because it is what I have experienced as a civil engineer and know that they will face in their possible future engineering career.

How do you communicate what you believe to your students? To their parents? To your colleagues?

Students - I share stories and examples from my career as a civil engineer with my students. I tell them about myself and the joys and difficulties of being an engineer.

Parents - I connect with parents that are engineers at conferences and through email and invite them to talk to my students in class or help out with different projects.

Colleagues - I share engineering stories with my colleagues. We talk about our experiences as engineers.

March Assignment Questions

1. What is going well for you as you work on your assignments?

I appreciate the length of the assignments and how the assignments relate to what we are doing and learning. I don't want to work on assignments that are just busy work.

2. What are you learning about yourself?

The are several things that I am learning about my teaching styles and skills. What I like is the new ideas that I can use in my classroom. What is hard for me is feeling vulnerable and exposing my teaching skills or lack of skills in some cases to others.

3. What questions do you have?

For the logistics of the assignments, sometimes it's difficult to know where to look for assignments, where to upload assignments, and what needs to be completed

4. What are you wondering about?

Do the assignments keep tying together to one central theme or idea? Are we going to see these assignments again and again? What is the overall theme or overarching concepts to the assignments?

Norms

Courage
Can't be afraid to fail

Shame
Learn about all the others from studying shame
Shame is the gremlin that says you're not good enough
Shame - never good enough
Shame focuses on yourself not on your behavior; guilt focuses on your behavior
Shame is correlated to addiction, bullying, suicide
Guilt is inversely correlated to those things
For men - shame is not be perceived as weak
For women - it's a straight jacket
Shame is an epidemic in our culture

Vulnerability
Most accurate measurement of courage
Birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change
To create is to make something that has never existed before

Empathy
The anti-shame
Shame and empathy cannot exist together

Forgiveness
To find our way back to each other, vulnerability is the path

Paths and Passions

Why I Love Teaching: 

I love teaching because it excites me to be able to share my engineering skills with students and get them excited about engineering. I love to share my real-life engineering examples with them and help them discover interests in engineering through hands-on projects. I expect the M.Ed. program to give me invaluable teaching skills to effectively and efficiently share my love of engineering with my students.

Action Research Interests: 

Technology is very important to me and to my students. I would like to constantly increase technology usage in my classroom and be able to use many different types of technology effectively.

Area of Developing Expertise: 

I would like to develop more expertise in the area of student engagement. I constantly ask myself how I can keep students engaged throughout the lesson and what else can I be doing to increase student engagement. This is of interest to me because I feel like it ties in with technology usage in the classroom, and also because I feel like students can easily become focused on their grade in the class and not on learning and can also get distracted quickly.

Action Research Question

Action Research Question:

In what ways will strategies related to student engagement impact student achievement on assessments in a high school classroom?

In what ways will implementing technology increase student learning in a high school classroom?


In what ways will implementing student online portfolios increase student learning in a high school classroom?

Focus:

Blogger

Reflecting on others' Blogger

I decided to change my action research question to using online portfolios. I currently use Blogger in my classes as an online portfolio as a assignment turn-in and reflection tool. However, I want to further research the use of this tool to understand if it increases student learning. I also want to have students provide feedback and reflect on each other's online portfolios to further increase student learning.