Annotated Transcript

Welcome to my annotated transcript. On this page, you will look into my journey through my graduate education in the Master of Arts in Education (MAED) program at Michigan State University (MSU). 

TE: Teacher Education

CEP: Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Special Education 

ED: Education

This course was taken at the start of my teaching internship year at Michigan State University. As I worked toward becoming a successful English teacher, this course guided me and supported my learning of pedagogy and teaching practices. At the end of this course, I created a poetry writing unit to display my ability to not only craft lessons but to show how to blend lessons in a cohesive manner to form a unit. 

This course was also a part of my teaching internship year at MSU. The focus was on problems of practice that interns encounter while learning how to turn classrooms into communities. After completing work revolving around problem-solving and community. The final project centered around designing classroom systems. This included classroom norms, rules, and routines, as well as a grading system.  

I took this course as my internship year came to a close. Here, I learned about teaching and learning through the process of practicing, reflecting, and revising. The goal of this course was to create a portfolio website that showcased artifacts and my expertise in meeting the Teacher Preparation Program standards. This course allowed me plenty of room to reflect on who I am as a teacher, and what the field of education means to me.

It is here where I truly felt myself beginning the journey of being in my Master of Arts in Education (MAED)  program. This class was designed to understand many different areas of teaching and learning. Throughout the course, I read and wrote essays on topics such as culturally sustaining pedagogies in diverse cultures, how race has affected women's education, and students who struggle to behave in a way that represents the norm. As a final project, I reflected on all of my readings and topics I encountered throughout the course. 

The focus of this course was language, and specifically how to best teach and support English Language Learners in the classroom. As a teacher who has ELLs in my classroom, I found this information imperative and helpful. I was also allowed to take a step back and understand my own language and heritage while deeply exploring the importance of language in the classroom. Ultimately, this course led to a final project where I observed and ELL teacher and her class. I was able to reflect on the masterful teaching I saw and take away strategies and ideas to implement in my own work. 

The key word to properly describe this course is: Motivation. In this course, I spend the entire semester working with one student in order to understand their motivation to learn and work through a diverse range of motivation strategies. This course allowed me to focus on a student I saw each day and evoke positive changes in real-time. The end goal of this course was to complete a motivation case and assessment that relayed all of the information I had learned, strategies used, and a reflection of the process. 

It was in this course that I had a narrowed focus on best practices for teaching reading and writing. The readings were incredibly well-aligned with my day-to-day practices in my classroom. I was also given the opportunity to analyze the literacy of two of my students and create a lesson plan intended to lift up their literacy and understanding. This class balanced theories and strategies while allowing me to see in real-time what worked best for my learners. 

During this course, I once again was able to spend time working with one of the students in my classroom. This time, the goal was understanding the learner's literacy and using assessments and creating lessons that would support the learner. Throughout the semester, I worked on a document that I updated weekly with my progress. By the end of the course, I had crafted an intricate paper detailing the experiences and outcomes. 

This course was one of two that rounded out my time in my MAED program. The focus was understanding behavior and behavior assessments and interventions. This is broadly put, as we also dove into how vital it is to connect with students in a meaningful way to, as educators, provide a place where they feel cared for. Throughout the course, many readings, modules and activities were completed with a final "special topic" project where I dove into the topic of caring communities. 

As one of my final classes in my MAED program, this course allowed me to fully reflect on my time in the program as well as who I am as an educator. Each week of this course, I pieced together different aspects of my online portfolio. By completing modules, I created new components such as reflective essays and a showcase of my graduate work. The final aspect of this course was an exhibition of my portfolio to obtain feedback that led to the final version of the portfolio.