C.L.Steele

     Connecting Counts

 

In a box in my attic there is a small spiral-bound book I created when I was in Kindergarten.  On the front, it says All About Me, surrounded by rainbow plaid paper. Inside there is a page, typical of kids who are in Kindergarten, entitled: “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up”. Under the title I wrote, in Kindergarten handwriting: A TEACHER.  From a young age I knew what I wanted to do, but wound up pursuing science for a long time before changing my major to illustration and then to art education. It has been a long path, but every decision and experience has influenced where I am today. My interest in science and maths has driven my passion to continuing to develop an art curriculum that specifically targets math and science skills.
 

My desire to continue learning and continue being a teacher meant I would naturally need to pursue a Masters of Education degree. The question for me was to either follow a leadership track which would focus on curriculum to some extent or follow my renewed interest in special education. While my interest in special education runs deep and relates directly to my new teaching position, I wanted to expand my knowledge of administration and curriculum development.  I don’t regret this decision, as several of these courses have been extremely inspiring and have influenced how I continue to teach.

 

I went into the Master’s program at Michigan State University in 2012 thinking I would be undertaking coursework to expand upon curriculum development, how to write to the new common core standards, and a variety of other related skills. I was very excited and driven to create an arts curriculum when I applied and excited about the opportunities this degree would unfold. While I certainly learned about the history of curriculum development and where curriculum development is headed, I learned a great deal more that has directly influenced my teaching in the here and now.

 

My principal uses a sign in American Sign Language that sums up my experience upon entering CEP 882 Creating Inspirational and Compelling Learning Experiences. The sign looks as if you are moving the back of your brain to the front and the front to the back and roughly translates to “thinking outside of the box”. As much as "Thinking Outside of the Box" is a popular buzzword, the act of rewiring how I think was fundamental to this class. CEP 882  certainly made me feel as if I had to turn my thinking about curriculum and instruction inside out. This course forced me to re-evaluate how I teach and structure my lessons and how I approach presenting a lesson. Students were asked to examine teaching from an entirely new point of view. This class was an eye-opening journey through new ways in which educators can take cues from other (non-academic) disciplines in order to create exciting experiences in the classroom. David Wong led this class through a variety of exercises in which we critically examined the arts of movie making, music, and interior design to assess the ways in which they use skills particular to their professions to create profound experiences for audiences. From this we extrapolated ways in which we could use similar skills in our lessons to create a more compelling and engaging experience for our students. Because of this course I continually reexamine how I can make a lesson compelling, interesting, engaging, or personalized for my students. Could I turn the lesson around and teach it from “top down” or present it by focusing on a different aspect of the same target skill? This is especially critical for the population I work with in which engagement in the lessons is critical to sustaining cognitive control. This course has given me an invaluable skill for turning ‘ordinary’ lessons around, rewriting them to engage the students, and personalizing them for cognitively non-normative learners.

 

While CEP 882 gave me the inspiration to go infuse my lessons and curriculum planning with more creativity and engagement for my students, EAD 801 Leadership and Organizational Development helped me cultivate the leadership skills to take on bigger issues. The goal of this course was to analyze an issue in our schools that was causing a multitude of smaller day-to-day frustrations and then use our research and peer discussion to find a way to a solution.  The course helped me navigate through some incredible problems regarding vertical communication between administrators and staff that was impacting day-to-day activities. This course taught me to reframe issues, to engage in meaningful discussions, and to find ways to work with resistant individuals towards a solution that works best for the school as whole. I was able to gain the confidence needed to tackle leadership issues in the future by learning how to establish and engage a team of committed individuals. As it happens, in my new teaching position we are divided into groups to tackle issues of lateral and vertical communication, collaboration between teachers, and other issues that require solid leadership and communication facilitation skills. I credit EAD 801 for giving me the confidence to carry out these new duties. Before this course I would not have had the skills to engage a team towards a common goal with open and effective communication.

 

There was one further important concept I wanted to delve deeper into while in my Masters of Education program. That was the concept of educational communities. As I was interviewing for new teaching positions, I was looking for schools that had a strong community. I wanted to be part of an educational group that trusted each other, valued each other's opinions, and actively engaged in collaborative education. TE 818 Teaching and Its Social Context with Lynn Fendler and Eujung Jin and TE 823 Learning Communities and Equity with David Davenport both built my knowledge about learning communities and the importance of having strong educational communities to support testing, curriculum development, diverse learners, and using new technology in the classroom. Both courses discussed how a close community of teachers influences the quality of education students receive during their academic experiences.  These courses also expanded upon the current research that states that collaborative educational communities increase teachers ability to sustain a teaching practice. These two courses revitalized my knowledge of why schools with close-knit communities are often more successful for teacher retention, comfort, and collaboration- the last of which is particularly important to me. In my experience schools with a community of teachers who have bonded around a common cause are more effective teachers and are often more open to skill sharing and collaboration, both of which are important for infusing lessons with engaging experiences for students as well as keeping teaching exciting for the teachers. TE 818 and TE 823 each discussed the benefits of learning communities, how to assist in building a community of educators, and gave me a fresh look at how successful educational communities are formed.

 

As I look back on my experiences in the Master’s of Education program at Michigan State University, I am reminded that despite the whirlwind of reading and research this time has been, this degree path has been nothing but rewarding. My original goal was to fill a gap in my educational knowledge about curriculum development and administrative leadership and I have certainly done that. In addition to these new skills, I have learned many new things that will be fundamental to how I proceed forward as a teacher. I will constantly be re-evaluating my curriculum design in terms of how I include a student’s interests, culture, and personality into those plans. Instead of self-assessment being a yearly activity spurred on by supervisor reviews, I now assess what I have done every minute, recording it and immediately rewriting lesson plans. Moving more deeply than “was that lesson successful”, I perpetually review lessons in terms of what I could change to engage the students and help them maintain cognitive control. What have I discovered about my students’ background and hobbies that I could use as tools for academic engagement? What academic weaknesses have I uncovered that I could include in current lesson plans or support with online applications? How could this lesson incorporate other academic or daily life skills?  Improving how I teach has become a minute-to-minute reassessment and daily critical self-evaluation process.

 

This degree coursework has also improved my skills as an academic leader. My leadership skills have shifted and I am now comfortable in actively forging new relationships with staff in order to establish a solid team that is comfortable sharing skills, resources, and connections to better support students we all work with. This is vital to my work, as my students have a number of teachers they see day to day, in addition to physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech language therapists, and other full time staff. Busy schedules, time restraints, and human tendencies often result in not communicating small insights, observations, and successes with our shared students. Our school has a close-knit community, but we could certainly take steps to making that community even more cohesive on a day to day basis. Communication between individuals is not always strong; however, I feel comfortable with the skills I have learned during this program to pull those lines of communication together in order to better serve our students. There is a Zulu saying, 'Umuatu ngumuntu naga antu’ which means “A person is a person because of other people” and this truth has been lost in the restructuring of the public school system throughout the years. As I have learned through my coursework, being an innovative educator is an ambitious goal, but having a community of educators alongside you who can work as a group to support students is invaluable to seeing that goal become reality.

 

I have bravely started on a new path in my education career. I am equipped with a great deal of knowledge that will carry me on towards working in curriculum design. In addition to that long-standing goal, I have gained a lot of new personal connections, learned about the benefits of educational communities, and gathered many helpful Online Educational Resources and digital tools that will help me continue to expand how I teach and how I engage with other educators. The completion of the degree program does not mark the end of learning for me. So long as I continue to teach, I know this program has given me the ability to continue to harvest new ideas, build new communities of leaders, develop new concepts, in order to challenge and engage my students.