My second week of my certification classes is officially in the books.
It was somewhat of a long week.
Thank goodness I had Monday to get ahead. I could totally deal with teaching four days a week so I can do other work on the fifth day!
I spent a good part of the week agonizing over an assignment I had not received feedback on…only to discover that I had the due date wrong. I blogged about that a few days ago.
When I finally did receive feedback on Thursday, I began several long, hard days of work.
This is how I spent Friday night and all day Saturday…
My toughest assignment was in my Instructional Strategies class. This is a class where we are being taught how to write a unit lesson plan.
We are building the unit plan in parts to better understand how each fits together and the proper order for writing the components.
The week before, we had selected our topics, the standards, and the benchmarks for our plans. We also had to write a rationale, which explained to the students how the topic is relevant to life in general, their current lives, and their lives in the future.
Deep thinking required, let me tell you.
Last week, we had to write four student learning outcomes for each of the four benchmarks we had selected the week before. Guys…that is a total of 16 outcomes! Outcomes are what you expect your students to accomplish and learn. They are comprised of three parts…a condition, a performance, and a criterion (how you’ll measure the task). Basically, you are deciding what the students will be doing to show mastery of each benchmark and how you will measure the assessment.
THEN, we had to write one overarching essential question and two topical essential questions. The overarching question is a question that can travel from unit to unit, and the topical questions are unit-specific but related to the overarching question.
Whew!
I worked on my assignment for 16 hours.
I am not exaggerating.
I happily went to bed on Saturday night having submitted that assignment.
In one of my other classes, I had to select benchmarks and learning outcomes for phonemic awareness and phonics lessons. This was a little time-consuming but not too bad.
In my Teaching Profession class, I had to take a philosophic inventory and write my teaching philosophy.
Deep stuff.
By the time I am finished with this program, I will have analyzed myself inside and out. Oh my word, but the critical thinking these classes require is hard-core!
But I want to share something with you.
I doubted myself the first week.
I doubted if I really was cut out for this teaching thing.
I really, really wanted out.
Last week’s feedback on my first week’s assignments gave me validation that I am doing what I am supposed to do.
Sure, this is not going to get easier, but God showed me in no uncertain terms that if I rely on Him (which I TOTALLY am because there is absolutely no way I could have written those words on my assignments on my own), He will help me through the tasks that follow, and I WILL be a better teacher because of these classes and all of the deep thinking.
I am so grateful for the friends and family who continue to encourage me.
Oh, and BTW, the dogs were totally feeling my pain…
It’s great to have their support too. 😀
Filed under: Teaching | Tagged: certification, EPI classes, teaching | 4 Comments »
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