Planning and Preparation
After fifteen years of teaching, the last twelve in the Crawford Central School District, my ability to plan and prepare for my classes has continually grown. I have become more effective in my creation of quality lessons, clear objectives, and assessment methods. This has allowed me to communicate teacher expectations to students in a clear manner, as well as to more accurately assess student comprehension of content. I would credit these improvements in my planning to two factors. First, I take great care to reflect on my strategies in the classroom and to use those reflections to inform updates to my methods. Secondly, my openness to new ideas found through professional development. In the last several years, I have taken advantage of any opportunities grow as an educator through training sessions, including AP Workshops, PETE & C, Flipped Classroom Training, and the Model Schools Conference, in addition to the graduate studies that I have completed up to this point (Drake University, Edinboro University).
"First, I take great care to reflect on my strategies in the classroom and to use those reflections to inform updates to my methods."
My lesson plans, in addition to promoting technology when possible, also advance the concepts of product and inquiry based learning. I regularly assign students projects that require the creation of posters, comics, brochures, podcasts, slide shows, and more. These projects are designed to have students to apply the content from our course of study to the real world, illustrate their understanding, and interact with their peers as they work through assigned tasks. Studies show that employers today seek employees who have strong communication and teamwork skills, as well as problem-solving abilities. I try to use my social studies content as a vehicle to help students grow in these soft skills they will need in the future. Some samples of my student's work can be found in the "Instructional Delivery" tab.
Along with the work I have put into planning lessons and projects, I have used various learning management systems to better communicate with students (as well as parents) and provide content for students who miss class or lose work. The evolution through my career from wikipages, mybigcampus.com, to Google Classroom and Canvas has coincided with district expectations in Crawford Central. This pre-class planning takes effort to frontload, but provides greater availability of content, study tools, and links to helpful sites to aid in student success.
Along with the work I have put into planning lessons and projects, I have used various learning management systems to better communicate with students (as well as parents) and provide content for students who miss class or lose work. The evolution through my career from wikipages, mybigcampus.com, to Google Classroom and Canvas has coincided with district expectations in Crawford Central. This pre-class planning takes effort to frontload, but provides greater availability of content, study tools, and links to helpful sites to aid in student success.