EDAP+Paper+2


 * How has your concept of “Teacher Role” changed?**

I was taught in college to be a constructivist teacher. To help the students make meaning. I think UbD goes one step further into helping your students make meaning but then to transfer that learning into everyday problems. But unfortunatley over the years of hearing cover the content and teach the test, helping student make meaning turns into idealizm. Pushing the students to that level of understanding takes time and energy and we begin to complain about how the students just don’t get it and we like the students who already “got it” before we even started teaching. I loved to hear in the one video how they did a growth test at the prep school and they saw that the students came to them smart and left smart but their wasn’t growth. Reading these artiles and watching these videos has revived my role of a teacher back to when I started teaching and makes me want to really work harder at asking the right questions. Have you ever noticed if you ask the question how was you summer? The answer is probably going to be good. But if you ask what was the best part of your summer you might get an answer that you were looking for. The ability of teachers to be able to ask the right questions and push the students thinking is very important. I think I probably would lean towards acquisition of knowledge is what kind of teacher I am because that is the most basic level of understanding for the students. I don’t think I’m doing a good job of teaching them to think farther into an issue and when I do I think I get them so far and then they don’t know the answer and then I’m giving them the answer. Right now I’m working with a group in 8th graders making videos. I see that many of them don’t understand the storyboarding part of the video. I think they don’t really understand that until they go to film and don’t know what to film then they say, “what am I suppose to say” or they just film any way without thinking through where to camera should be. I gave them the knowledge by telling them but I’m throwing them too quickly into transfer knowledge and I’m not sure I’m helping them through that process. They have to transfer the knowledge because they are taking the video compositions that I taught them and now they are having to think through what compositions they want in their video and why. I think that as they finish the video they will be able to look back and see how they should have made their storyboard or see places in their video that they could have added more information or taken more information out of the video. I’m also sure that they would have a much better understanding of how to storyboard on their next video. Sometimes it’s even good to make the activities backwards. Obviously you have to storyboard before your video but to show them a video that they need to show what they storyboard to that video might have looked like I think could be helpful. I showed them this backwards but because of time I didn’t have them do it. While in the text it said that Acquisition, Meaning Making, and Transfer are all important as a teacher, I would argue that if you can get students transfer their knowledge then you would have to be doing the Acquisition and meaning Making. I see Acquisition as a DOK level 1, Meaning Making level 2, and Transfer the top level or as they said in the TPACK middle section where all three things come together the “holy grail.” Because of this and me knowing that I haven’t reached this level of teaching yet, I would feel the least comfortable in the transferring. When I reflect on my teaching through the lenses of UbD I see that I am just throwing a lot of activities together and hope they all equal something. Don’t get me wrong the activities are all fun, engaging, and they are learning something important but it lacks focus. However, even in the UbD I can see this happening very easily too. In the example they gave about the car the the end goal is to have courteous drivers and anticipate and adapt their knowledge of safe and defensive driving to traffic and weather. When you get down to the activities one of them is changing the oil to your car. Now changing your oil is a very useful skill that can save you money if you know how to do it but I don’t see how it fit into the desired goals. And about the only thing that will help you get better at adapting to traffic and road conditions is by practicing. I can see how sometimes this is frustrating to me when I’m trying to plan a lesson and I have a specific goal in mind but also knowing that true understanding is many years down the road until they can do it proficiently on their own. Or I say, yes that person is a courteous driver and they come in to take their driver test and they didn’t get much sleep last night and now they are cranky and something happens and they explode and the other person assessing them doesn’t think they were courteous when they only saw them for a short assessment where I saw them for a longer one.