Artifact: Submit evidence of reflection on your individual teaching abilities. Include a minimum of (2) two artifacts: evaluation feedback, your own reflections, e-portfolio links, professional growth plans, recommendation letters, stakeholder feedback and anything else that showcases introspection into strengths and weaknesses as an online educator and document all in your individual blog.
Since I began teaching 7 years ago, my philosophy has always been that the purpose of education is to equip students with the knowledge, skills, and confidence needed to be successful in life. An essential part of this is teaching students to self-reflect and to see their strengths and weaknesses as learners, to understand what areas of the content they have mastered. Mastery looks different for each student, and it took me three years of frustration to fully wrap my mind around that. I had become sick of having conversations with students (and parents and teachers) that were all about points and scores but never about what students actually knew. So for the last 4 years, I've made it a point each year to try to shift conversations away from points and scores and more toward mastery and competency and to intentionally provide multiple means for students to demonstrate their mastery of the content. I've made it a point to be more intentionally standards-based and data driven. And after administrator evaluations and informal conversations with students, I think it's working.
I teach in a brick and mortar school, but I would consider my class a blended classroom. Essentially every unit incorporates various virtual learning experiences and technology-based assessments. I believe that one of my strengths as a teacher is incorporating meaningful, standards-aligned tools and experiences that differentiate the content, process, and products of student learning. Over the past 3-4 years of using these tools, I've also learned to use the wealth of data these tools provide to differentiate instruction and create personalized learning paths for students. Reading and seeing examples of this in the Evaluate course has reinforced that I'm on the right track in this area, but it has also shown me areas where I can grow.
Since I try to provide students multiple personal ways to interact with the content and demonstrate mastery, I've had to create or find multiple assessments. But ensuring that each assessment is equitable, consistent, reliable, and valid has been an area that I've always worried about as a weakness. The Evaluate course has given me tools create competencies and rubrics as well as tools for evaluating the validity and reliability of my assessments. Those particular modules were very helpful, the reliability and validity assessment in particular. This will certainly be something that I use as I reflect back on this year during postplanning.
For the moment, I feel the traditional classroom is my "place" and my calling. However, blended and flipped instruction has always appealed to me. I feel better prepared to make the digital leap in the coming year having learned so much about planning, creating, implementing, and assessing online learning through this program. My progress through the eTeacherTOOL has been part of an online endorsement program, so maybe that with the endorsement on my certificate and with more experience I'll eventually be able to transition to teaching fully online or at least adjunct. I believe education as a whole is headed toward more personalized learning. So regardless of where or how, I hope to combine the skills I've acquired here and through my own experiences with my personal love for technology to accomplish my mission of equipping students with the knowledge, skills, and confidence needed to be successful in life after high school.
TKES Evaluations
Instructional Survey
Answer: What are your teaching strengths? What are your teaching weaknesses? Provide a reflection on your teaching abilities, philosophy and how Evaluate has prepared you to teach online.
Since I began teaching 7 years ago, my philosophy has always been that the purpose of education is to equip students with the knowledge, skills, and confidence needed to be successful in life. An essential part of this is teaching students to self-reflect and to see their strengths and weaknesses as learners, to understand what areas of the content they have mastered. Mastery looks different for each student, and it took me three years of frustration to fully wrap my mind around that. I had become sick of having conversations with students (and parents and teachers) that were all about points and scores but never about what students actually knew. So for the last 4 years, I've made it a point each year to try to shift conversations away from points and scores and more toward mastery and competency and to intentionally provide multiple means for students to demonstrate their mastery of the content. I've made it a point to be more intentionally standards-based and data driven. And after administrator evaluations and informal conversations with students, I think it's working.
I teach in a brick and mortar school, but I would consider my class a blended classroom. Essentially every unit incorporates various virtual learning experiences and technology-based assessments. I believe that one of my strengths as a teacher is incorporating meaningful, standards-aligned tools and experiences that differentiate the content, process, and products of student learning. Over the past 3-4 years of using these tools, I've also learned to use the wealth of data these tools provide to differentiate instruction and create personalized learning paths for students. Reading and seeing examples of this in the Evaluate course has reinforced that I'm on the right track in this area, but it has also shown me areas where I can grow.
Since I try to provide students multiple personal ways to interact with the content and demonstrate mastery, I've had to create or find multiple assessments. But ensuring that each assessment is equitable, consistent, reliable, and valid has been an area that I've always worried about as a weakness. The Evaluate course has given me tools create competencies and rubrics as well as tools for evaluating the validity and reliability of my assessments. Those particular modules were very helpful, the reliability and validity assessment in particular. This will certainly be something that I use as I reflect back on this year during postplanning.
For the moment, I feel the traditional classroom is my "place" and my calling. However, blended and flipped instruction has always appealed to me. I feel better prepared to make the digital leap in the coming year having learned so much about planning, creating, implementing, and assessing online learning through this program. My progress through the eTeacherTOOL has been part of an online endorsement program, so maybe that with the endorsement on my certificate and with more experience I'll eventually be able to transition to teaching fully online or at least adjunct. I believe education as a whole is headed toward more personalized learning. So regardless of where or how, I hope to combine the skills I've acquired here and through my own experiences with my personal love for technology to accomplish my mission of equipping students with the knowledge, skills, and confidence needed to be successful in life after high school.
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