Dear Teacher Practitioner Colleagues,
Our first session of the semester was stimulating for me and I hope equally as interesting for you. I look forward to learning how I best can guide your learning during your capstone experience this year. It will be a pleasure to learn beside you as I know you will keep me on my toes!
Thoughts concerning your Teacher Reflections:
In your teacher reflections, think about your students and your classroom and why you do what you do. Clarify your teaching practice to yourself. What is your teaching philosophy?. These reflections will become an investment in the future that you can utilize in your research as evidence of your teaching rationale. The more frontloading thinking you do now, the more you can draw from when it is time to write your proposal & research. Remember that your reflection is considered data also! So by reflecting, you help to "mine out' the real underlying issues & questions for your research project. Much of what you do from now on will be following in the true shoes of a researcher, which means, the more time and care you give to your thinking and reflecting, the richer your overall rewards will be in the process and product of your research. Trust the process and yourself even if you are unsure of not knowing for sure. This process may contribute to your own transformation as a learner and researcher!For we know learning is anything that changes us; and changes many times are uncomfortable experiences where we move beyond our comfort zones into the realm of the unknown. As researchers, ambiguity becomes our friend! Your research is like your own trust walk.
A reflection prompt is provided for your next teacher reflection below for your consideration.Learning with your Students......On the importance of teachers learning alongside students excerpted from #6 of Seymour Papert on Project-Based Learning: "What we need is kinds of activity in the classroom where the teacher is learning at the same time as the kids and with the kids. Unless you do that, you'll never get out of the bind of what the teachers can do is limited by what they were taught to do when they went to school. And I think that's possible, and it's a different concept of what kind of educational kind of materials and activities should go into the school. It's in line with what I was saying before -- that we mustn't think only of, "Is this to be judged by what the kids learn?" We've got to say, "Judge it by what the whole system learns, (and) that includes the teacher." The teacher's got to be learning at the same time. And then with this robotics stuff, it's an example because ... every situation is unique. It's never been there before. And that's very different from the classroom situation where we're teaching math fractions. We've been there before. The teacher is not learning anything because the teacher knows that already. And this is a very bad situation for learning. Again, one of my favorite little analogies: If I wanted to become a better carpenter, I'd go find a good carpenter, and I'll work with this carpenter on doing carpentry or making things. And that's how I'll get to be a better carpenter. So if I want to be a better learner, I'll go find somebody who's a good learner and with this person do some learning. But this is the opposite of what we do in our schools. We don't allow the teacher to do any learning. We don't allow the kids to have the experience of learning with the teacher because that's incompatible with the concept of the curriculum where what is being taught is what's already known."
Source: see #6 of Seymour Papert on Project-Based Learning
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“Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.” ~ E. B. White
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