Proposition 5

The fifth and final proposition, “Teachers are members of learning communities” (NBPTS, 2019), suggests that the students aren’t the only ones learning at school or in the classroom, but educators themselves are learning from their students and colleagues everyday. A commitment to teaching is also a life-long commitment to learning, because a teacher’s field is constantly evolving and changing, and teachers need to be able to keep up. Teachers should also be sharing their practices with other teachers and members of administration, and also be willing to give feedback themselves in order to give their students the best learning experience.

For this final proposition, I'm using a presentation I made in EDU 610 for my colleagues, sharing what I had learned regarding student agency and self-assessment:

Rationale:

When developing learning communities, the most important member of those communities are the students! industrial age, factory line education doesn't work anymore because it doesn't let the teacher know if the student is retaining any of the information, which in most cases, they're not. Teachers have to be dynamic and present, and allow their student's voices to be heard, and make them as much a part of the learning experience as teachers, working together as colleagues as opposed to a superior and a subordinate.

Self-assessment is a powerful tool in engaging learning communities, because it allows the teacher to assess the student's understanding of the content first hand, versus trying to gauge a student's understanding based on the content they've produced alone. It also allows a student to reflect on their progress, and what the educator needs to focus on with them to ensure mastery of the content.

For this presentation, I also took a lot of feedback from my students at the time, looking for feed back as to what could help them learn more effectively and make the classroom environment more enjoyable. Gamification of activities like quizzes with apps such as Kahoot, independent projects that channeled the student's interests, and alternative forms of assessment that tapped into other forms of intelligence were reported.

It's incredibly important to listen to your students and their needs, as they are the most reliable source of information regarding their understanding of a subject. Using methods that tap into their their personal interests and strengths also gives them an opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge in unique ways that may help other students (and the educator) see the content from another perspective, broadening their understanding.

Reflection:

Teachers need to let the students speak up in all areas, whether it's feedback on performance, self-assessing their own performance, and sharing their unique strengths and talents with each other. It's important to allow students to have some agency in the classroom, as it gives them a sense of autonomy and control, taking charge of their own educational experience, ultimately giving them the power to invest themselves into their own education.