The competent teacher understands the diverse characteristics and abilities of each student and how individuals develop and learn within the context of their social, economic, cultural, linguistic, and academic experiences. The teacher uses these experiences to create instructional opportunities that maximize student learning.
Artifact 1
Teaching Strategies for Emotional and Behavioral Disorders
The slideshow below was made to give some teaching strategies for teachers with students who have emotional and behavioral disorders. It was made in the spring of my Sophomore year of college for my Introduction to Special Education course. The goal was to research the causes and characteristics of a disability under IDEA and find teaching strategies to help students with that specific disability. The presentation contains three teaching strategies that I found which I thought would be most effective based on further research and personal opinion and perspective.
Illinois Professional Teaching Standard 1D states that a teacher "understands the impact of cognitive, emotional, physical, and sensory disabilities on learning and communication pursuant to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act". While doing the research for this project, I learned that students with emotional and behavioral disorders have trouble with communication and impulsivity or acting out. The three teaching strategies I chose to cover in my presentation dealt with how to help these students handle their emotions in a mature way and how to help them to take a step back and analyze whatever is troubling them so they can handle it calmly.
I learned that positive reinforcement rather than punishment is much more effective because no student likes constantly being corrected and punished. Having classroom rules posted somewhere in the classroom is also effective. My high school would make social contracts in each class at the beginning of the year. I think this is a really effective way to create rules for the classroom and to get the entire class involved. It helps to keep everyone accountable and makes sure that everyone knows the rules because they created them. That way, they're more likely to follow the rules throughout the year.
Artifact 2
This video is a recording of a presentation that I did for my Educational Psychology course in the spring of my junior year of college. The project was to record a presentation that we created on a chapter topic from our textbook for the course, Education Psychology, 14th Edition by Anita Woolfolk, and conduct further research into the topic. The chapter topic that I chose was on the ideas of culturally relevant education.
Illinois Professional Teaching Standard 1F states that the competent teacher "understands his or her personal perspectives and biases and their effects on one’s teaching." The principles of culturally relevant education/pedagogy hinge on teachers' abilities to reflect on themselves and identify their biases. Everyone has biases and to believe otherwise can only do future harm to one's self and the people one interacts with, especially their students. Similarly, it's important for teachers to teach this to their students and help them to identify their biases as well. As I mentioned in the presentation, Project Implicit is a really good example of a test that can help individuals to start to discover their implicit biases, but it by no means is exhaustive.
I strongly agree with the ideas of culturally relevant teaching and I believe that it is incredibly important for teachers to teach their students about implicit biases and how to identify them in one's self. To believe that someone has absolutely no biases is idealistic and impossible. As much as biases are harmful, they are also natural. They are decisions and judgments that the mind has come to about individuals and groups based on previous experiences or stories they've been told. They are how people learn to protect themselves and others, even if the beliefs and information are incorrect. Students need to first and foremost accept this and realize that having a bias is not a personal failure, but an opportunity to improve and learn to be better people in the future.