STCBlogPosts

 19 October 2022 "Drawing on Rimm-Kaufman, Tomlinson asserts that “Establishing routines, processes, and mechanics is about making learning more effective and efficient as well as creating a caring classroom culture.” What is your current position on this as it relates to your future practice/classroom?" To be perfectly honest, the idea of trying to navigate a differentiated or even simply a learner-centered classroom scares me. It sounds like a lot of hard work that I am not yet prepared for. However, I do agree with this statement, and I think that routines are important in helping facilitate learning, and understanding the processes of students and their use of mechanics furthers that. Additionally, none of this can be done without a caring, safe, and/or comfortable classroom culture. Still, while I agree with these things, I believe that the reality of the classroom is that this cannot always be possible. Even when trust is established, there will be days where it is not ...

30 August 2022 "As you think about planning and implementing instruction during your field experiences (which occur within educational environments very much focused on standardized test scores),  where might you see the possibilities of incorporating a student-centered approach?" This isn’t an idea that has occurred to me until very recently, but I do like the idea of giving students more of a choice. Not necessarily to take a test or not, but to take a test more geared towards certain things. I hope to eventually generate three different types of tests with various approaches to test-taking. Maybe some with more multiple choice, some with more matching, and some with more short answers. Obviously, each of these will have components of the others, but will still be heavy on others. At certain points, I will not allow students to make this choice, or I will make them pick an option that they don’t normally pick (I will keep this in mind while grading).  Additionally, as an En...