Week 5 T2P

(see "week 4 T2P" blog to see my responses to your comments)

As we learned from Frank Oakley today...

If a teacher is experiencing misbehavior in their classroom, and is unfamiliar with teaching theories, and does not perform self-evaluations of their performance as a teacher on a regular basis, then the teacher's heuristic approach includes a bias perseverence, and the problem might lie in what the teacher brings to the mix.

First, I really enjoyed the homework that was due today. It was really neat to see videos that our students make, and their perspectives on what's going on in the world and how it effects them. In a way it made me a little scared. I haven't been around high school aged kids in a long time, and what I see every day in our TCPCG is obedient classrooms since we are all graduate-level students. I'm afraid of what will happen when I get to the classroom and students do misbehave. Will I know how to react? How will students react to my reaction? Will students respect me and others? How do I provide them with relational caring, while also acting as an authority figure? I'm looking forward to observing the summer classes next week so I can start to hopefully answer these questions!

The class was very productive today, definitely because of how everything was scaffolded. It was helpful for us to get in groups and develop our own heuristics, and then share them with the group and develop a group heuristic. I also like the big case that we got because we knew how to approach the problem, we all had roles in our groups which made it easier in such a large group with such a complex case, and the problem was relevant. This example seemed like a real and typical issue that a teacher might have in a classroom, so it was good to see other's views of the problem and how they would approach it. I think getting expert advice from my colleagues and from my peers in the TCPCG program is going to be a huge source of knowledge for me in the classroom.