Prepared and Confident Educator
I will be forever grateful for my Master of Arts in Education from Michigan State University. As graduation approaches, I have been reflecting on the courses that have taught me invaluable information and new instructional practices that I will carry with me throughout my teaching career. I have also been reflecting on how this program has changed my life and my teaching practice. I chose to get a Master’s Degree in Education because my Bachelor’s Degree major is Integrative Studies from Oakland University. I chose to get an Integrative Studies degree from Oakland University because it gave me the opportunity to choose my major-standing courses to benefit my life after graduation. I chose to combine the majors of Elementary Education with Communication and Psychology. I believe that this gave me an advantage over only having an Elementary Education major. After I graduated from Oakland University, I began an Alternative Route Certification program called TeacherReady through the University of West Florida. This program allowed me to earn a teaching certification. Although I have a teaching certificate, completed a certification program, and have taken courses in Elementary Education, I felt that I needed to further my knowledge than I learned in my bachelor’s degree and certification program in order to become a better educator. I realize that I wanted to complete a program in the field of education. Therefore, I chose to get a Master’s Degree in Education from Michigan State University. The program changed me in many beneficial ways due to the thoughtful courses that I received, which includes: Educating Students with Challenging Behavior, Teaching School Subject Matter with Technology, and Elementary Reading Assessment and Instruction.
Anybody that knows me well will tell you that I am a kind and happy person. I want my students to have a role model and an example of proper behavior. I became a teacher with the intention to teach students how to be nice people. I want to teach my students manners and people skills in order to be successful in society. I believe that students need to learn expectations of social norms and how to handle any emotion. These are skills that should be taught and practiced in order to gain social norms that are necessary in life. In order to further my knowledge in how to do this, I chose to take a course called, Educating Students with Challenging Behavior. This course had an influential impact on me as an educator. I gained knowledge about how to interact with students with challenging behaviors and help them understand their feelings and actions. In this course, I learned about managing challenging behavior through classmate discussions and course readings. I learned what challenging behavior may look like, causes for it, and effective ways to help students with challenging behavior. This course also taught me about behaviors that I have and have not seen in my own classroom. I feel prepared for any challenging behavior that I might face after taking this course. At the time of this course, I had a student with defiant behaviors. Based on what I learned in the course, I was able to intervene and improve his behavior through a behavior modification technique. Based on what I read in the textbooks, I reflected on my behavior as a teacher. I realized that I have the ability to have either a positive or negative influence on my students based on how I talk to and interact with them. Although I am naturally a happy person, that is not the case for all people. I realized that I needed to understand my students and their lives in order to help them understand their behavior. I also realized that I can give my students a positive aspect within their lives. One of Hiam Ginott’s quotes that I read in the textbook has resonated with me, “I’ve come to a frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized.” This quote encompasses what I learned in this course. I have the ability to have a positive or negative influence on my students based on how I treat them. I choose to always be a positive influence on my students no matter what challenging behavior I come across.
Prior to taking the course, Teaching School Subject Matter with Technology in the summer of 2020, I was familiar with some technology that can be used in a classroom. I was aware that technology is available and beneficial for teaching but I wanted to know more ways on how to use it to help my students better understand the material and succeed. This course taught me about a countless number of websites that are free and available for teachers to implement into classrooms. Technology has transformed life as we know it including schools. Teachers and students now have the access to information at the tip of their fingers through the use of technology. This course also made me realize that I am able to differentiate my instruction through the use of technology. Each child is different and may respond better to different mediums than the traditional lecture, textbook, and paper approach. One of the many mediums that technology offers is a video. During this course, I created a video that taught a second grade science lesson. That is something that I had never done and now that I have that experience, I feel prepared and ready to create more videos as another approach for student learning. Technology also engages students in a way that is different from traditional lectures. I had noticed a difference in my students’ engagement. For example, I was introduced to a website called Kahoot. It is an assessment game that allows the students to read the question from my shared screen and choose an answer on their own device. There is a countdown which excites the students. Then they can see a scoreboard with scores of who answered it correctly the fastest. This website has replaced my informal assessments. Now, I create an assessment on Kahoot where I can progress monitor in a fun and engaging way that the students enjoy. Due to the course, I now find versions of technology that I can use in my classroom to benefit my students. I am thankful for the extensive knowledge of technology that I gained in the course, Teaching School Subject Matter with Technology.
During my undergraduate degree, I only had a couple courses on teaching and assessing reading. I felt that I needed to gain more knowledge in this subject, therefore I chose one of my two degree focuses in Literacy. Literacy is the ability to read which is a necessary skill for all students. Students need to be able to read in order to succeed in various aspects of life. Within my literacy focus, I took a course called Reading Assessment and Instruction during the fall of 2020. Through this course, I have improved my reading instruction. There are many benefits that I gained by taking this course. Some of the benefits include learning how to assess a student’s reading ability. When it comes to a student having the ability to read, there is more than only being able to read the words on a page. There are other factors to consider: fluency, comprehension, phonics, vocabulary, and the concept of print. I was familiar with these topics prior to the course but not an expert at any of them. I was teaching these skills to my students while I was attending various professional developments to better my practice. The professional developments were not as helpful as this course. Throughout the course not only did I learn more about what each topic entails but I was able to practice assessing student data on all of those skills. In order to practice assessing student data, I was asked to read and interpret a fake student’s scores on various literacy tests. By practicing assessing data, I was able to analyze and interpret the information as if it were my own student. This is a necessary skill of a reading teacher and something that I was attempting prior to this course, hoping that I was doing it correctly. My professor provided feedback on my analyses, strengthening my knowledge on how to assess student data. From the practice, I have become confident in assessing student data. Through the many hours of practice and reading, I have gained the necessary knowledge to interpret data from reading assessments. By having this knowledge, I can successfully plan data-informed instruction. This will allow my students to have a more individualized intervention plan tailored to individual needs. During guided reading or small-group intervention, I now know what to do when a child struggles with his or her fluency, vocabulary, or comprehension. During phonics instruction, I am aware of the necessary skills that I should expect from students in my grade level. I feel confident that I can assess any student’s literacy data because of the knowledge that I gained during the course, Reading Assessment and Instruction.
As a whole, my master’s program has allowed me to invest in my professional development and improve my teaching practices. In order to engage with students at a higher level and create student success, I chose to get a master’s degree. My master’s degree has changed my view and practice in many beneficial ways. I feel much more confident as an educator because I have studied and put forth effort towards various aspects of teaching. I am thankful for the experiences and development that I have gained from completing a master’s degree. I have gained new instructional practices and methods that I will use throughout my entire teaching career. For example, I have gained knowledge in improving student behavior and the psychology of classroom management. I have learned how it is important for students in a math classroom to feel a sense of belonging. I have learned how to instill an interest in writing within my students. I have learned the concepts of educational inquiry that made me think beyond what I already knew and wonder about education. I have learned that there are many differences in literacy learners and how to reach students at all levels within one classroom with differentiated instruction. I have learned that through the use of technology, I can engage students that were once not interested in a lecture. Those are just some of the many teaching skills that I gained through my experience of completing a master’s degree program. My bachelor’s degree prepared me for running a classroom while my master’s degree helped me better understand the aspects of being a successful educator.