This essay reflects on the way certain course changed how I think and practiced teaching via specific assignments and activities done during the class. it highlights the 810, 813, and the MAET Overseas courses that I took during my grad school experience.
What aspects of a person make them a “maker”? Is it their ability to create art or music? Could it be their mindset around solving problems? Or is it their ability to synthesize physical products and objects for people to use? If you had asked that question almost 2 years ago, I likely would have given you some combination of those answers. It would have been hard not to, given that was the framework I had always heard the term “maker” described in. Even more ludicrous would have been if you had me if I was a maker. After all, at that point in my life, a high school ELA teacher hardly fit into the box that I thought of as “maker”. However, my frame of reference has changed. The MAET program has provided me with a huge opportunity to alter how I look at not only myself, but also my students, career, and future.
While I could spend pages waxing on about the entirety of the program, its advantages, and the tools I have gained just through participating in it, there are 3 courses that I took that I believe truly changed not only my mindset around what being a maker is, but also who I am as a person.
CEP 810- Teaching for Understanding with Technology
As the first course that I took as part of my MAET journey, the 810 class really was my first step into viewing myself not just as a teacher earning his graduate degree, but as a maker with a unique perspective on problem solving. The course’s main focus is to initiate new graduate students into the core MAET ideas and practices that would go on to assist me in the classroom and my future grad classes. For me, this course had two projects that truly felt as if they were instrumental in changing me.
When I began looking into graduate school, I did not, for even a second, think that it would have me cutting vegetables in my kitchen with a spatula. Of course, using a spatula to cut anything at all would be suboptimal, even in the best of circumstances. That, however, was precisely what the Cooking with TPACK assignment was trying to get at. TPACK (short for technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge) is a framework that educators should be using when it comes to using and teaching with technology in the classroom. Ideally, a teacher knows their content, knows their teaching methods, and knows how to use technology effectively enough that they are able to determine the correct technology to use for their lesson. The problem comes around when those conditions are not met. The Cooking with TPACK assignment was a thought experiment in purposefully using less than ideal tools in order to complete a task that seems impossible. For me, it was like taking a step into a student's shoes, being given an assignment that I felt I had no means of completing with tools that I did not think would be enough to do the job. This assignment has been crucial in how my mindset has changed, as I tend to constantly double and even triple check to make sure that I am giving my students the correct tools to complete their assignments, as well as to always make sure to have a kitchen knife when it's time to prepare vegetables.
Teaching is an ever evolving profession. Each year teachers are told that there are some hundred different theories on teaching and learning, sometimes contradicting the ones we learned the previous year. It can be daunting to be part of such a constantly changing career. Just as teaching is ever changing, so too is the world that our students will be entering. 21st century learning truly encompasses the idea that we need to prepare our students for the “real world” by preparing them for however it might change. This can look like teaching them critical thinking skills, digital literacy, emotional skills, and problem solving. Our 21st Century learning project had us first collect our thoughts on the idea of it (for which I both reflected on its need while also considering some of its drawbacks), followed by creating a lesson plan in which we take a piece of technology and write a lesson surrounding it. For me, while this was an incredibly interesting activity, and definitely made me rethink how I view the growth and development of technology in education, I also pushed back quite a bit during this project, as I saw, and still do see, some portions of 21st century learning that concern me. I mention this as “pushing back on grad class ideas” is not something I found myself doing most of the time. Now, I try to be a bit more of a critical thinker, which I think might be more in line with 21st Century thinking than just blindly agreeing with it.
CEP 813- Electronic Assessment for Teaching and Learning
The entire premise of teaching, both modern and historically, has been to instruct students on a topic or idea, then evaluate them on how well they learned and understood the lesson. In 813, we spent a great deal of time reflecting on what type of assessments work the best in which circumstances, evaluating our own previous assessments, and most importantly, creating lessons in the Sandbox
What can be better than playing in the sands? It is a modalable, fun material that you can draw in, dig through, and use to build structures ranging from simple mounds to elaborate castles. But sometimes you are not given the tools you expect, and end up making a hut when you try to make a mansion. This was the idea behind the sandbox assessments. We would be given a randomized list of constraints, technologies, and assessment types from which we were to build the best assessments we could. While at the time, I found myself very frustrated with these activities, I do think that, in hindsight, they were amazing for not only my ability to think on my feet, but also the types of assessments I could now use effectively in my practice. Anyone can ask students to memorize a definition, guess on a multiple choice, or answer true or false questions. After the sandbox, I was having my students write constructed response prompts for each other to answer, or allowing students to create PSA to demonstrate their understanding of the dangers of cyberbullying. Assessment does not seem to be going anywhere, but how we assess our students is always something that we should be trying to improve upon.
Overseas 2024: Strategies for Transformation
Finally, I believe that it would be impossible for me to talk about courses affecting my thinking and practice without speaking about the overseas learning experience in the summer of 2024. Taught by Liz Boltz, this course was actually 3 courses all rolled into one 4 week extravaganza, covering topics such as research, data analysis, and applying the foundations of creation and UDL to everyday teaching. This class would be instrumental in changing my practice and mindset through three tools and projects
I cannot overstate the change my practice, particularly the Digital Media course I teach, has gone through just by me more thoroughly learning to use Canva. Of course, if you look at the course syllabus, you will not see anything about Canva on it. That is because my class serendipitously got a crash course in everything Canva by one of my fellow classmates, Abby Coleman. Abby is another passionate educator who has gone through and graduated from MAET, but is also one of Canva’s biggest fans. Everyday we would learn about a new feature the site added, a new training that was available, or a new hack to create professional looking creations to show off our work in the class. It was thanks to Abby and the Overseas class that I was able to change the digital media course that is taught at my school from a program focused on marketing through Adobe and Photoshop into a course focused entirely on creating and making through Canva.
Most educators could tell you that there are an uncountable number of theories of learning, and that everyone likely has their own beliefs on the best way to get students to learn. But how many have taken the time to write it all out, spelling out their beliefs on how students learn best as well as their inspirations from theories in the past. In the strategies class, we did just that, taking the time to explore many past educational theorists and how their ideas shape how we teach today, our levels of agreement and disagreement with each’s ideas, and then take aspects of a few of them to explain and create our own unique, written out theory. As a teacher, I have almost definitely had discussions with coworkers and administrators about the best way to go about helping students learn, so this activity really helped me form a more nuanced, thought out mindset in the goal of educating students.
After a few years of teaching, most educators begin to fall into rhythms and habits when it comes to teaching certain lessons or units. It is easier that way of course, if you know exactly what you will be teaching in the exact way you want it to be done. This however, can lead to academic stagnation and professional laziness. This is where the Unit Renovation Creation (URC) comes in. Liz asked to take a unit that we had taught previously and to enhance it using theories of education, research, and purposeful creativity. Taking the time to revisit a familiar unit and inject it with all the activities, tools, and data we have access to in order to make it a better version of itself. My personal URC focused around the preparation of my students for standardized tests and their mindset around it. Already, I have implemented this URC into practice. Particularly, I spend a more extended amount of time talking to the students about the mindsets they should go into testing with: advising them to think not like they are students taking a four hour long exam, but to rather think of themselves as test writers themselves, looking for the patterns and phrasing in questions that can lead them to the answers.
Conclusion
From the adventure of creating my own learning theory while in Ireland to making assessments based on a random idea generator, the MAET program has been fundamental in changing both the way I look at teaching and the way that I teach. While I highlighted these three courses, I could have easily spent just as much time expounding on the ways the others made me the teacher I am today. I think the thing that affected me the most throughout the past almost two years, however, were the people. I have been given life changing feedback from instructors who truly only want to see me create my best work, and I have made friends and colleagues that I still reach out to when I have a question or need help. The folks in this program have helped me change my mindset, and that change in mindset has let me change my teaching practice.
References:
Anderson, M. (2012, September 24). TPACK Explained – TPACK.ORG. Dr Matthew J Koehler. Retrieved November 8, 2024, from https://matt-koehler.com/tpack2/tpack-explained/
Canva. (n.d.). Canva: Visual Suite for Everyone. Retrieved November 8, 2024, from https://www.canva.com/