I chose my coursework in the Master's of Arts in Education (MAED) program at Michigan State University so as to push myself to learn and think about education in ways that would make me a better school leader. You can find highlights of my work from this program on the Showcase page.
Below you will find each course that I took as part of my degree program and a brief description. Courses are listed in the order that I took them, with the fall of 2015 listed first.
This course examined what is meant by "learning society," different aspects of a learning society, and the experiences of those in a learning society. I really enjoyed the lectures that Professor Weiland had written for this course. I found them to be invaluable. I also particularly enjoyed the glance at the past in order to better understand the present.
This course dealt in the crossroad of leadership, technology, and learning and pushed me in my first semester of graduate work. The course examined new technologies and their potential to change the way we teach and how students learn. I can remember being a bit concerned about the requirement of a Twitter feed and now use my twitter to keep myself abreast of educational writing.
As this course's title indicates, it focuses on learning in school and in other places. The course material dove into learning, intentional and automatic and how it is supported. I enjoyed thinking about all the various settings in which one would learn and I particularly enjoyed the focus on self as we thought about learning in a personal way. It is in this course that I created a Personal Learning Theory as a final product of this course.
One of two required courses for my degree, Concepts of Educational Inquiry is designed to ask the most fundamental questions of education. In this course, I particularly enjoyed the writings of Vivian Gussin Paley in The Girl with the Brown Crayon. I read this at the time that my own daughter was in kindergarten and it was a truly amazing experience to be contemplating education in ways that touched so close to home.
I took this course because I did not view myself as a particularly "creative" person and I wanted to challenge myself with it. This is one of the courses that I most enjoyed. Our reading was mostly from Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People by Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein. It required me to create a website (the first one I'd ever made). It also had me interview someone and I chose a woman that I admire in so many ways. We had a wonderful talk about creativity and I learned quite a bit about her journey in creativity. That conversation ended with an invitation to have her teach a class at my school. This was a really interesting approach to creativity as we examined it's many aspects.
This course raised questions about the use of technology and how we teach with technology. There is no escaping it. But this course raised some questions for me in terms of what is best for our children. Is it best to always be connected? And in a world of increasing connectivity are we really just more isolated?
Leading Teacher Learning is a course that values growth and acknowledges the importance of growing teachers. It introduced me to the PLC in detail and it provided me with incredible resources. At the time, I did not know exactly how valuable this course would prove to be, but I started at a new school in 2017 and this school has collaborative days. In addition, this course pressed me to think about teacher learning in terms of growth.
This course was fundamental in my thinking about ways to help my own faculty. It was interesting to think about the ways in which adults learn differently than children, which has always been my focus in my classroom. One piece that really stood out to me was how learning is social but for adults can also be very vulnerable. This really shaped my views and approaches to faculty growth.
This was a course with the intention to help think through the design and implementation of training courses and professional development. It was important to keep in mind the social contexts in which that professional development or training were to take place. I found this course helpful in thinking about my role as Dean of Faculty. I always want to include faculty voice when deciding on ways to bring professional development to the school.
Though I did not need the credit for graduation, I enrolled in this course concurrently with the capstone. It will be the last semester of my graduate work and this was a course that I thought would be very useful in considering how we learn. I did not want to pass up the opportunity to take this course. Though not yet complete, this course has touched on topics from intelligence to temperament.
This Capstone is the culminating experience of my work in this degree program. As you are reading my website, you are reading and learning about that experience. Thus far this Capstone has made me reflect on the coursework that I took and the work that I've produced. It has made me reflect on what I've learned and how I will use that knowledge.