Spring 2011: Post Four

For this blog posting, please provide us with feedback on the Practicum Plan. It would be really helpful to know how useful it was in keeping you organized throughout the semester and in helping you make progress toward personal learning goals that you identified. When you comment on your partner's blog, please note any ideas that you feel had merit and caused you to reflect further on your feedback.

Sine the Practicum plan was not set in stone I did not look at it often. It was confusing to look at with all the other papers and information attached to it. My mentor teacher and I looked at the checklist to make sure we were staying on top of what we needed to during the semester. It would have been more helpful if I knew what the assignments I put on the Practicum Plan were. I would add an assignment for subjects such as Education 401, but not know what to do for the assignment until a week before it was due. The date that I wanted to get the assignment done by no longer mattered. I couldn't complete the assignment if I didn't understand how to complete it or what I had to do in the first place.

Instead I used my agenda book. I would look at the following week to see what was due and then plan from there. It was easier for me to just think about one week at a time. There were so many assignments to get done this semester, that I would have drove myself crazy trying to think about everything at once.

I think this Practicum Plan would work better if it was in a calendar format. Next years participants could look at the calendar week by week and decide if they had time to do that assignment; if not they cold erase it and write it somewhere else. The due date for an assignment would be in red pen, and the anticipated date would be in pencil. I think the plan would also work better if all the professors and teachers knew about it and worked with the plan in class. They could explain each assignment in full and talk about when would be best to complete the assignment; or which assignments need to be done in the PDS and which ones do not.

Spring 2011: Post Three

Please select two Characteristics that are different from the ones you discussed in your earlier post. (If you have not reflected on Characteristic 3, please include this as one of your selections. I've targeted this one as it has proven challenging to interns when they put together their final portfolio. I'm hoping this will give you a chance to begin thinking about it early.) In your posting, describe one artifact that you think illustrates each Characteristic you've selected. Tell why.

Characteristics of a Novice Teacher

Characteristic 3: We believe that the novice teacher should recognize that teaching is a professional, moral, and ethical enterprise, should understand moral issues and ethical practices in educational environments, and should have developed ethical frameworks which facilitate effective teaching.

Description: Teachers are looked up to in many ways. A teacher should try not to be bias and force opinions on students. The teacher needs to be professional at all times; even outside of the classroom. Teachers actions and attitudes towards a subject affect student interest and opinion.

Artifact: My character education plan reiterates how to be honest, both inside and outside the classroom. I included a clip from a commercial most students would be familiar with. The Geico commercial explains honesty in a humorous way.
In order to have a comfortable environment in your classroom, a teacher must have a good behavior management plan. The behavior management plan that I will be creating in my Educ 401 class, will explain how my future classroom will be set up in order to obtain a comfortable classroom for my students.


Characteristic 6: We believe that the novice teacher should have in-depth knowledge of content.

Description: Teachers should be a master in their specialty as well as in Education. They should have knowledge of texts, and strategies that work in their content. The teacher should have a broad range of existing resources in their content. They should have the resources needed to learn new information and how to apply it to the classroom.

Artifact: My C&I 424 portfolio includes artifacts from my college career that meet state standards. Each standard includes a rational on why I included the artifact(s) I did as well as one or more artifact.