Blog #4

So, here is my final blog for this class. I have enjoyed my Clinical so much. I think ecverything has really started to connect the last couple of weeks. I want to talk about Cooperative Learning as my last strategy. I have been fortunate enough to be in an Honors class. These kids are really motivated and driven to do well. While doing my unit, I put them in groups every day for an activity. I know that Marzano says it isn't a good idea to use Coop groups every day, but I wanted to try my activities to see how well they worked. In my own classroom, I would use the activities once or twice a week. Anyway, the kids loved it! They were so competitive with the other groups. My activities were game oriented. The kids would be given a criteria for writing a poem or lines of a poem and then the other groups would have to guess what their criteria was. They would try so hard to follow the directions but disguise it enough so the other groups would not be able to guess right away. I can see how coop groups wouldn't work in some classroom situations, but for mine it was great! Everyone participated equally. After I did group with the kids, my teacher has started using them also. She put them in groups when they did riddles. She has also put them in groups for peer evaluation.
I have gotten so much out of this class. It has been challenging but, so much fun. I had a wonderful clinical experience so incorporating the strategies was easy. I think I have grown as a teacher from my first day until now. I also know that I will incoroporate these strategies throughout my teaching career. Backward design makes sense to me. To have a goal and then outline the steps to get there is not only a way to teach, but it's a way to live your life. As a teacher, I hope that I can pass along not only content material but also life lessons. I said in one of the reading relflections that once we change the way we think about teaching we can change the way students think about learning. When you look at the big picture, UbD makes sense. I have other lesson plan formats but, I think this one will be the format I choose. Starting with the goal and then planning how to get there works for me. The class has been awesome. Good luck to everyone in their future teaching experiences.