Final Blog Post

Honestly, I think that I have learned more about teaching in this course than all my other education classes combined.  Many of my other classes covered "learning theories," or gave general overviews of how to to teach  and what we need the students to know.  This was all interesting, but not the most useful when it came to making lesson plans.  In this course, in contrast, I learned tangible ways that I could help my students learn.  And the best part-it happened several times of week.  It wasn't just here or there, but almost every time the class met, I was able to learn something about teaching literacy that I could actually sit down and apply to my classroom.  This is one of the big reasons why my teaching portfolio was mostly full of lesson plans I made for this class.  They actually had substance instead of just fluff.

Another aspect I liked about this class was that it wasn't all opinion-based teaching.  We learned about proven ways to teach literacy, backed up by research and experience.  Plus, we got to try many lessons ourselves and were able to learn how they worked from a student perspective.

As a English teacher, we will be dealing a lot with literacy and language in my classes.  So, going into this class, I thought I would already know most of what we talked about (compared to something like math majors).  While I did know some things from my English teaching classes with the English department, I didn't realize how much I actually didn't know until this semester.  In retrospect, if I would have known that I didn't know all this stuff, then I would have been nervous to go teach.  Now, I feel much more confident and prepared to actually help my students learn useful skills.

Here are some major points I hope to remember and apply to the classroom:

• Variety-give the students lots of variety when you teach.  This includes giving them choices, but also having a variety of lesson plan styles.  This way, they are more likely to be engaged day after day.
• BDA activities-sure, I knew what these were, but I had never had them broken down so nicely and until know, didn't really know why they worked and were important.
• Oral language-this is one of three keys things in English in the Utah Core, the other two being reading and writing. However, my previous ideas for incorporating this were to have the students do presentations.  Now, I have many more ideas.  One I really like is having the listener have a checklist of things their partner needs to check.  This idea engages everybody and helps both parties to be accountable.
• Vocabulary-all I remember from grade school about vocab was memorizing definitions and takings tests.   Through this class, I have seen ways that I can more effectively introduce and teach vocab that is also interesting to my students.

Overall, this was a great course.  Thank you so much for being on top of everything and making us feel like you cared about teaching, your job, and us and as individuals and future educators!