Kyle Anderson

Portfolio Summary

I had taken a class that was inherently the same as this one when I had gone to community college in Guam. There was not a lot that I had thought I would learn from this class, since I figured that I already knew most of the things about development and the theories behind it. However, after I approached it with an educator's perspective, my main goal of this class and this portfolio was to look at how I could implement this into my own classroom. The strategies and skills that I have learned from this class have been immensely helpful in preparing me for how I want to teach all of my students who are currently developing into the adults they want to be.

With the team deliverable, I was still getting my bearings and figuring out the template. My main goal was to structure the lesson in a way that my fellow classmates would be able to understand it and that they would be able to gain some sort of insight from it. Mixing in scenarios and facts about my topic was interesting, but including things like the 16 personality quiz and the Kahoot were what really made it so that we could interact with the class and help them apply what they learned. After seeing how the class engaged with the scenarios and how they came up with unexpected perspectives, I learned that I need to be sure to keep the lesson open for multiple interpretations in order to allow for different ways of thinking.

For the lesson on passion and emotion, I wanted to attach it to my area of learning and allow students to be able to apply what they learned about development to an English subject. I had decided to attach it to one of my favorite stories by Frank R. Stockton, "The Lady or the Tiger?" By having it attached to the story, I believe that students will have an easier time identifying how emotions effect their life as well as the impact they play  in reading and writing. As this was my first deliverable, I was a little scattered in the beginning, but with a little refinement, I learned that I was able to structure the skills that my students would learn into aspects that they can use in their lives.

For the lesson on morality, I wanted to take it a step forward and see if I could apply the principles of this class to a larger text. "Lord of the Flies" by William Golding was my go-to choice. The book itself has so many perspectives on morality and what happens when there are no rules or structure to a society. In forming the lesson, I leaned more into the academic side of things, and I was pretty proud that I was able to apply standards to something as intricate as "morality". I'm now interested in how I can form my lessons around certain concepts like good and evil and how I can get my students to consider these topics in an academic setting.

For the lesson on motivation, I wanted my students to focus on themselves and how they can reach goals if they set their minds to it. I believe that students should identify what they want to do and that the teacher can form the curriculum around that. For this lesson, I moved the academic side of things out of the lesson and focused more on the principle of motivation. With this, I was able to form a lesson that could help students identify effective goals and have the motivation to follow through. I feel that this would be a great start of a school year, allowing students to talk about what they are expecting, what I as the teacher am expecting of them, and how we can reach those goals together.

These deliverables may have been simple, but I also believe that they were effective in helping me form a new perspective on teaching. I always wanted to approach class from a new angle, but now I believe that looking at things from students' perspectives of development can really help me fulfill my job as a teacher. As for the principles and the theories that we focused on, I may have learned about them previously, but now I believe that I have a better understanding of how I can apply them to my life as well as the lives of my students.