Showcase

Hello and welcome to my Master of Education Showcase. This section of my cite showcases the different creations of work that I completed during my time in the master's program at Michigan State University. I have learned a lot throughout my time in the program and I am excited to share some of the pieces of work I have completed with you. I know that I have learned about and gained the necessary skills to be a leader of my own classroom while also giving students the opportunity and space to grow and develop as much as they can. 

During my time in the program, I have learned about many different projects and practices in the education realm. I have done a lot of group projects, individual work and projects, written countless essays and lesson plans, made PowerPoints, worked with students one on one, done different case studies, and learned and interacted from teachers with extensive experience and understanding. I have loved my time in the program and feel as if I have really gained a tremendous amount of experience from each course I have taken. 

The pieces of work I chose to Showcase in this part of my site are all apart of 3 categories: Literacy, Coaching and Sport Practice and Creativity in Teaching and Learning. 

Literacy

The literacy category showcases some of my work and assignments based on literacy practices and helping students with learning to read and write. In this section I plan to showcase my work and preparation for students and their own individual needs. 

Literacy Learner Analysis Project 

One of the literacy projects that sticks out in my mind from this program is the Literacy Learner Analysis project, which gives you the opportunity to identify a reader, and work through different testing and assessments to assess where the learner is at in their reading development. There are layers to this assignment, and it took an entire semester to gather all of the information while also learning about the student. I was able to practice with my reader based on their assessment the skills they needed to work on and then encourage them with results and so that they could see their improvement.  This assignment was not only challenging, but taught me so much about the time, energy, and effort that is required for each student to reach their full potential. In this artifact, I demonstrate my abilities to create multiple lesson plans based off standardized testing and ability of the student I am working with. By having an assignment that we were able to work on for an entire semester, it allowed for a lot of time to be put into adding things, or making adjustments to the project in order to make it as good as possible. I was able to also spend extensive time with my student and monitor his process throughout each of my lesson plans and assignments. Also, by using different standardized tests, I was also able to compare his abilities to other students at his grade level in order to also know what things needed to be directly focused on and practiced forming and create lesson plans and the use of specific assignments. 

Lesson Plan 1

 Lesson Plan 1, in order to further their reading techniques and confidence. The student is reading a passage about polar bears, and the focus of the lesson is for the student to be able to identify the topic/subject of the passage. This is to practice the students' skills in order to address their ability to identify subject of passages in readings. In this artifact, I demonstrate my ability to consider what things the student will need based off their current demonstration of knowledge. This artifact demonstrates my ability to know my student and know that they might need some work in reading comprehension and understanding. By providing them with a passage with a clear message and lesson, I can assess their ability to identify and understand the lesson. 

Lesson Plan 2

I also created Lesson Plan 2 where the main focus is the students ability to read a passage and identify the moral of the story or the lesson learned. In this artifact I demonstrate my ability to assess my students understanding of the different literacy terms. In their first lesson, it is asked that they identify the subject of the story while in this lesson they are required to understand the difference between the lesson/subject and the moral. This is to promote understanding of not only vocabulary, but the student's ability to follow the storyline and character development in a way where they can understand the true lesson of what they are reading.  This allows me to understand what literacy terms need more focus on from my students understanding of the differences. 

Lesson Plan 3

Finally, I created Lesson Plan 3 where the student was requires to write their own short story or fable where there was a direct storyline, and also moral to the story to fully show the students understanding of writing and making their work make sense, while also teaching a lesson to their peers, which shows understanding of creating a moral to their story.  This artifact demonstrates my ability to assess the progress my student has made based off all of our lessons combined. We are able to see where the students' progress is and test understanding of literacy topics, comprehension, and writing skills all at the same time. This allows for complete development check and understanding and we are able to fully understand where the student is at and what needs need to be met moving forward. 

Coaching and Sport Practice

This section goes into more of the sports leadership and coaching portion of my learning and development throughout the master's program. I got the chance to spend some time diving into the correlations between teaching and coaching and hoe similar the two are. I thought this portion of my learning in the program helped to advance my skills in a way that is educational, but also physical education and activity. 

Movement and Agility Assignment

During my time in the master's program here at Michigan State I spent a large portion of it focused on Sports Leadership and Coaching because when I started the program that was my primary focus. I have since switched to solely literature, but I have a year of work within the Sports Leadership and coaching realm that I have learned so much from.  A couple of assignments/projects that I would like to showcase are from the sports classes I have been in throughout my time in the master's program. The first one is my Movement and Agility initial post I think this was a key post which stood out to me because it started off that course for me with a lot of thought and deeper thinking on the thoughts of movement and agility within sport and how much goes into it. When taking a look at this assignment and the thoughts about how to add different levels of training so that our athletes have a higher level of training is really important. In this artifact I demonstrate my ability to communicate and teach students the movements we need to see them perform moving forward while also assessing their abilities to accomplish these tasks. In this assignment I discussed a lot about the sand training/running that happens preseason for basketball players. This is something that encourages ankle strength and foot strength and adds balance practice for the athletes. It is an example of cross training that allows for the athletes to practice and improve on their skills needed for on the court work. This assignment was a perfect example of adding different levels of training and showcasing the benefits of it. 

Creating a Tryout Plan

I also wanted to showcase a tryout I planned out for if I were to be a coach in the future and how to develop a plan for a tryout that can be used for being prepared to run tryouts for a high school girls basketball team and also knowing what things need to be addressed in order to know where the players are at based on their skills.  This assignment was really good practice for the preparation of planning a period of time of working with athletes. This artifact also demonstrates the importance of creating a 'lesson plan' or tryout plan where we are prepared to assess all of the skills the student athletes have and are capable of while also understanding where they should be in comparison to their age and grade level.  It is very important to note that walking into something that is really complicated and testing athletes' skills, it is important to have a plan in order to make the best use of time while also seeing what skills they need improvement on. 

Creativity in Teaching and Learning

This section takes a deeper dive into the value of creativity in teaching and learning and the benefits of allowing students to have more freedom in their learning processes, while also encouraging their own learning and thinking, to the point where they can take the assignment wherever direction they want to go with it. 

Creativity Portfolio

Finally, one of the main topics I wanted to focus on during my time in the master's program was Creativity in Teaching and Learning. I think there were multiple courses throughout my time that were focused on not only being a creative teacher but also helping students to be creative in their learning and development. During my creativity courses throughout the entire semester, we spent time creating a portfolio with all of our different creativity assignments and I feel really proud of the time and effort that went into creating all of these assignments individually, but also putting everything together into one large portfolio of work, it is something that feels positive but also is able to use in my future classrooms and for future students to work with. By creating this portfolio, I was also able to keep all of my work from the course together in one place, where I can use that for my future teaching and lesson planning and things will be very easy to find and use. This artifact really demonstrates my ability to complete and collect work over the course of the semester while also demonstrating my own creativity on the assignements provided. This course was very helpful with also giving me a lot of good ideas I can use for my students to implement creativity into their assignments. I think one of the very first assignments we did in the course was one that stood out to me the most and it had to do with finding something in your living space and thinking off all the different things it can be used for other than its actual use. I thought this was a really fun assignment because it was so interesting to see everyone else's creativity shine through with random objects and also gave a lot of freedom for a pretty open-ended assignment that I would love for my future students to try.  

Practicing AI Skills

I also worked on using AI in different assignments which was something I did not have any experience with previously, but we were able to use AI in order to create different assignments but also ask for information and insight on creativity and topics. This artifact demonstrates my ability to try new things and adjust to the changing times and technology in order to keep up with everything and add value to my students experiences. Like I said, prior to this course I never had any experience with using the AI sites, but it allowed me to also experience other ideas created by AI that added value to my thinking. I think there are positives and negatives for the use of these systems, but I think if used the right way, we can help students to use sites to add to their thinking and hopefully not think for them. I definitely think there is a line with the use of the AI sites and student's abilities to just have the AI format complete things for them. It was interesting and beneficial for me to have practices with these programs, so I have some general knowledge about it for the future and teaching my students about it.