Dr. Torres's EDUC 303 Spring Quarter

I think that in lesson planing the part that comes easier to me is coming up with ideas for a lesson, until I start writing it. Then the difficulty comes in when I have to pick what activity I need to have students do. I usually have lot of ideas, but I'm not sure which one would work better or that would be easier of me to teacher and for the students to learn from; I do not want to over complicate it. I also have many issues when coming up with the lesson. For example, I need to consider if the lesson is reasonable for the age group and if it would be interesting. I think that once I pick an activity and I find a standard that matches well with it, then I can find my learning target. From there I break it down into kid-friendly terms, which is easier or harder depending on the standard. I do not generally consider the process difficult once I understand what I am doing, as far as planning the activity, finding the standard and writing a matching learning target. The part that...

The Pros and Cons of Assessment Methods Selected Responses work well with assessing mastery of knowledge and reasoning proficiency; however this method is not good for assessing skills or the ability to create products. A pro is that it makes assessing quick and easy, because it provides a given right or wrong answer, which enables the teacher to quickly observe mostly accurate results that can be expressed in terms of a score as a number. A con is that it is variable to test anxiety and test preparation from the student and the quality of questions from the teacher.  Extended Written Responses work well with assessing mastery of knowledge, reasoning proficiency and works the best with assessing the ability to create products. However, this method is not beneficial in assessing skills. A pro of this method is that it allows the teacher to assess students on larger more complex pieces of knowledge, rather than in selected responses where students are asked to pick from l...

What part of deriving a learning target was challenging for you?  What connection does the learning target have with assessment? I think that the challenge of deriving a learning target is rephrasing it into terms that can be easily understood by the students. I feel that the language of the learning target, all though direct, may use terms that would be difficult to a young learner, such as in the younger elementary grades.  The difficult part  is breaking  down the learning target by using the words from the state standards so that it is understandable, but also still carries the essence of the learning target.  However, I think that is solvable after you have given your students enough tools and enough practice to fully understand the learning target verbiage. I think that another challenge is phrasing the learning target to align with specific lesson without over complicating it. I think that it can be over complicated when you are trying to ex...

I have not experienced, or at least noticed, when teachers were using standards or even that they were a "thing". I am walking into teaching, having known no different about the apparent struggles of standards. Because of this, I do not fear the idea of using standards. I think that they will be a helpful guide for teaching my students. I think that they provide an excellent check-list to make sure that my students are learning what they need to be learning.  As a future teacher, I view having content learning as an excellent advantage for teaching, because they set a goal and list out the steps. Without the standards, I think I would be completely lost on the subject of what my students are supposed to be learning and at what grade level. I believe that to have a standard set across the state it will be beneficial for students and teachers who might change schools, because it enables them to know what to expect. It also sets a specific expectation for all teachers, whic...

1.  What do you know about yourself as a learner? I tend to shy away from trying new things, but once I try it once I usually increase my confidence in it and want to do the best I can with it. I find that the best approach for me is to just jump in and go for it. If I spend time thinking about it, I tend to overthink it. Once I start doing it then it takes a lot to know when to stop, because otherwise I will keep trying to make myself better at it. It may seem contradictory that I like challenging myself, but also am afraid to try new things, but that's the best I can describe it. Compare it to this scenario: I have noticed that we, humans, tend to not like getting wet, such as if we are playing with water guns, we try our best not to get wet. But, once we get over that initial squirt, then we tend to not mind being absolutely soaked. I feel like that but with every challenge; the more I find the confidence to do something, the more I want to do it and to do better in it. For e...