The Teacher's Guide

This website is so great. If you are a teacher, visit this page!
It contains wonderful ideas for lesson plans, themed lessons, printouts, children's songs, book activities, and a teacher's store. What I found so great about this page is that all of the ideas are interactive. This word is so vital and important to me. I absolutely refuse to lead a classroom that pertains to me standing and lecturing in front of 30 silent children. My very being simply will not allow me to do this.

Children are social beings of nature, they were not created to sit quietly and allow teachers to fill their heads with useless tests materials.

Something really cool about this website is that it has a link for Virtual Fieldtrips. This is such a fun advantage to simply lecturing to kids on topics such as The Sistine Chapel, The Dead Sea Scrolls, The nine planets, and dozens of other topics. This way your children are learning interactively. It is extremely simple to transform a classroom into an interactive one. Don't know what to do or where to start? Google! There are hundreds of fantastic resources on the web to help you get started. Do it for your students' sake. Help them to love education.

Autistic Students

Working with autistic students is something that I truly cannot wait to do. For an in-field experince, I was assigned to work at Little Tree Preschool for a semester. This school and the staff who work there truly have my heart. They do an amazing job with their autistic children, and the kids are advancing at an unbelievable pace.

This school practices ABA, Applied Behavior Analysis, which in my opinion is the very best practice for autistic children. I feel that these children advance far beyond others who are not using this analysis. Applied behavior analysis (ABA) is the science of applying experimentally derived principles of behaviorism to modify behavior. ABA takes what we know about behavior and uses it to bring about changes of the behavior (frequency, topography, latency, speed, fluency). The behavior is analyzed utilizing behavior assessment to determine the functional relationship of the behavior within the environment(Wikipedia).

I found this conversation off of this website
Here's how a trained person might make this an opportunity for practicing conversation skills:

Teacher: Hi, Alex, are you excited about Christmas?
A: [no response]
Teacher: Are you excited about Christmas? Say, Yeah, I want to open my...
A: Yeah, I want to open my presents!
Teacher: [Smile] Me too! What presents did you ask for?
A: I asked for presents.
Teacher: What presents did you ask for? Say, For Christmas, I asked for...
A: I asked for a bike. For Christmas.
Teacher: Cool! [Small tickle] Are you excited about Christmas?
A: Yeah, I want a bike.
Teacher: [Bigger tickle] A bike! That's great! I've got my tree all decorated with ornaments. I put lots of ornaments on MY tree. [Point to A's tree.]
A: I put heart ornaments on my tree.
Teacher: Alex, that's so great! [Great big tickle]
A: Ahhhhh! Cut it out!

There are six main ways that ABA positively affects children with Autism
I found this information at this website (ShapingBehavior.com)

1.to increase behaviors (eg reinforcement procedures increase on-task behavior, or social interactions);
2.to teach new skills (eg, systematic instruction and reinforcement procedures teach functional life skills, communication skills, or social skills);
3.to maintain behaviors (eg, teaching self control and self-monitoring procedures to maintain and generalize job-related social skills);
4.to generalize or to transfer behavior from one situation or response to another (eg, from completing assignments in the resource room to performing as well in the mainstream classroom);
5.to restrict or narrow conditions under which interfering behaviors occur (eg, modifying the learning environment); and
6.to reduce interfering behaviors (eg, self injury or stereotypy).

I hope this information has been helpful to you. I am clearly a fan of ABA, and being a future Early Childhood SPE teacher, I will certainly use its practices.

Teacher Accountability

I did a project in one of my classes on the issue of teacher accountability. Is it fair to let our students' standardized test results be the center of control for it? It is indeed a sticky situation. Most teachers jump to the gun and say absolutely not, but throughout my research, I found some teachers who liked the idea. It is truly difficult to decide how teachers should be held accountable. In a perfect world, you would assume that it could be based on the students' achievement levels and test scores, but in this world there is a lot of factors to affect that.

It simply isn't the same for all teachers. You have teachers in wonderful white middle class schools, and you have teachers in Title 1 low socio-economic schools. Unfortunately, these two schools are going to have dramatically different scores, no matter how well the teacher performed. Another factor is Special Education. One teacher may have one inclusive child, while another may have six or seven. Again, unfortunately these teachers are going to have a difference in scores.

The teachers I ran across in my research felt that teacher accountability based on test scores was a positive thing for a few reasons. (Mind you, these teachers were teaching in a white middle class school). First, they felt this was a good thing for those teachers who don't care. We all know that there are teachers out there who only choose this profession to have "summers off", or to have the same schedule as their kids. This way, they are forced to teach properly and forced to make sure their students are learning what they are supposed to be learning. They also felt this was a positive thing because it gave teachers a roadmap for the year' instruction. It is easy to get sidetracked and stay on a particular subject for longer than expected, but with standardized testing, teachers are forced to cover all of the standards in a particular time period. This way, students across the board are truly getting the same education.

When I become a teacher, I do not want to be "forced" to do these certain things. I want to WANT to do these things. I do not want to care about my accountability, I just want to worry about how well I am performing, and if my students are getting what they deserve. I know that many classrooms these days are environments of stress because the teachers and students both are worried about the standardized tests coming up. I feel that if I do what I am supposed to do, and have fun while doing it, then my students will ace the test, and I will ace my test as well.

Technology in the Classroom

Yes, this is such a broad and overused topic, but I found this article Integrating the Internet into the Classroom and I think it is a good basic start for new teachers. It contains information on basic ways to begin using technology in your classroom. It isn't anything crazy and high tech, just good first steps.

I do plan to use a good bit of tech in my classroom. Of course, I will be a new teacher so I'm not trying to overload myself in the very beginning. I think that I will pretty much follow this article. Its basic points were that the internet in classrooms is positive in the aspect of

1) Research
2) Classroom Website
3) Online Assessment

I feel that if I contain these values in my teaching methods then I can consider myself a "technology literate" teacher. I think this is a common ground between being over the top with tech stuff in the classroom, and being stuck in the 1920's with zero technology. I think it is wise for teachers, especially new teachers, to smart small and add something new every year. If you go into your career with technology based everything, I think it is simply bound for failure. It isn't practical. I am certainly not knocking anything tech based, I just think starting out small is wise.

Interview with Mr. Sullivan

I think Mr. Sullivan did a fair job of describing a tech literate teacher. We pretty much agreed that as long as you have some form on technology in your pedagogy, then you are fine. I think it is wise, especially for new teachers, to start our with something small and comfortable, and then gradually increase your technology use as you feel more and more comfortable. It is important to use it though. Kids' lives today are literally centered around technology, so why should it be any different at school? It just seems like common sense to me. If it works for kids to learn, why are some teachers still not using it?

If you have not had much training in technology usage, do not overdo yourself. You will get lost and confused in the midst of it, and you will leave your students 10x as confused as you are. As long as you use something, I am positive that your students will notice and appreciate it. Even young children can recognize if their teacher cares about school and learning or not. Your reaction to education ultimately affects theirs as well. They look up to us as leaders, and if we are not going above and beyond these days, they notice.

Progressivism

I hope and plan to transform my future classroom into a progreesive approach. I fear for students who are required to sit in a desk and listen to the educator spit out facts of memorization. I truly do not want to do this. One of my professors, Dr. John Strange instilled the love of technology in the classrom inside of me. He taught me practical tools and projects that I will one day use with my students.

As far as the progressive approach, I want my students to interactive and collaborative. I want my students to learn by doing. Children are able to positively form relationships through acting out real life experiences. When children are allowed to think for themselves, and experiment for themselves, there is an enormous opportunity for learning.

I do not feel that I can change educational schooling on my own, or even with the help of others. This current form of teaching we have is unacceptable, but unfortunately I do not think it is going to change anytime soon. I do however think that if individuals like myself make a difference in each individual classroom, then we are destined for success. Every teacher has the chance to positively affect 30+ childrens' lives, and if we commit to doing so, then we have achieved something wonderful