Melissa Blazejak
ePortfolio: Educational Technology
EDU 511- Teaching & Learning: Concepts & Models
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Students are expected to gain a systematic body of knowledge from which they can develop a repertoire of teaching practices and curriculum materials to meet the learning of students in K-12 schools with divergent learning styles, developmental characteristics, and socioeconomic backgrounds. In the course you will learn to use theory to explain and analyze learning and teaching, with an emphasis on helping you develop the skills of instructional planning and student assessment. The course is designed to compliment your clinical/professional experiences in schools, providing an avenue for you to make connections between theory and practice.
In this class, we learned about the two types of teaching theories known as Behaviorist and Constructivist. Behaviorist is like a lecture, where the teacher does all the talking and the students just listen. Constructivist is more student focused, where they do most of the talking and the teacher helps or critiques them where needed. Appendix E is a lesson plan that is designed to be both behaviorist and constructivist. The first part has the teacher doing the work while the second part has the students in the role of the teacher. This was also my first attempt at both theories and creating my own lesson plan, needless to say, my plans get progressively better as the program goes on!
Part of this class looked at how to change your teaching based on the needs of your students. In our final project (Appendix F) we had to research a hot topic and write about how to effectively teach those particular students. I choose ADHA and how to engage students with ADHD by using certain strategies and classroom management techniques.
The moon phase lesson plan (Appendix G) is one of my favorite plans to date. For this assignment we had to use both behaviorist and constructivist theories to rework one of our lesson plans. Since I do not teach my own classroom, I reworked a lesson plan I had used as a substitute teacher. The original plan was to just pass out a graphic organizer and have the students list the moon phases. In my lesson plan, I incorporated a hands-on activity to engage the students in the topic.