Brooke-Lynn's Blog

Yesterday, I attended the Student Teaching Portfolio presentations. This is a biannual event in which pre-professional teachers nearing the end of their program at UMF reflect and present on the time they spent in the field. It’s also an opportunity for other students in the program to collaborate with and get advice from these “student teachers." The first person I spoke with was an elementary education major working in Lewiston. She shared with me the work she had done over the period of her student teaching and some resources she had found particularly helpful in her kindergarten classroom. While much of her work was specific to her concentration and not necessarily applicable, her teaching philosophy stood out to me. She built her philosophy around the Stanley Kubrick quote, " I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. I...

Thanks to Laney  for helping me create this!

In  Embedded Formative Assessment, Dylan Wiliam makes the case for formative assessment as the way to improve the learning of all students. He first makes this case by supporting his assertions with statistical evidence. This evidence is followed by specific strategies he considers successful and a discussion of their benefits and disadvantages of each. Beyond formative assessment, there were many themes that persisted through the book, many of which are summarized on my Twitter by chapter ( 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ). In each chapter, he addresses a certain aspect of effective formative assessment in practice. Although I think it is important to have a holistic view of the classroom and the many things educators must do for their students, Wiliam makes a persuasive case for the power of formative assessment as a way to engage students and inform future instruction. Something I especially enjoyed about Wiliam's book was his recommendations of specific strategies in each chapter. M...

For the last three weeks of radio silence, I've been in the field, teaching sixth graders in my local school district. It has been an awesomely meaningful experience, as tiring as seven hours of eleven-year-olds can be. During this time, the students have been my focus and I have spent a lot of my time outside of the classroom reflecting on the occurrences of the day. Although I only completed eight days in the field, I learned a lot about the realities of teaching. My cooperating teacher has been a wealth of information, and our teaching styles are very similar. Nonetheless, I have also been exploring online resources to improve the teaching I have been doing. As a part of an assignment in which my classmates and I reached out to our former teachers, we requested resources from these educators. Many of these were useful in informing issues I ran into while in the field. Emily at Teacher, Teach Me How to Teach!  recommended Edutopia , a website bursting with information and advic...

Last Friday, I attended the Association of Computer Technology Educators of Maine (ACTEM) conference. I had been preparing for this conference for almost a month, so I went into it confident in my work and expecting a positive experience. (After I finally woke up, having left campus before six in the morning). As expected, I came out of the conference with new ideas and resources for my unit and for teaching in general. I received many recommendations for tech, many of which I will be looking into for future unit planning, and a couple I may use in the unit I am currently building. These are things I might never have even thought to look for without these recommendations. I'm looking forward to integrating some of the resources, especially the add-ons to Google Suite apps, which I think will prove to be effective formative assessment tools. The sharing of resources is one of the most practically beneficial aspects of collaboration and I was glad to have been i...

For those of you that don't know, I am currently building a unit for an English literature class for the first time. There are a lot of things I am trying to take into consideration with it, so I'm constantly altering in little (or big) ways. Right now, I'm pretty confident in my unit sketch, which encompasses a number of standards and learning experiences. For the purposes of my classes, I have focused primarily on three major assessments for the unit. Recently, I made a Padlet to express these assessments using images of displays from MoMA and Smithsonian . I approached this as an opportunity to test out Padlet as a potential technology to use in the classroom and I certainly did learn about the program. I was surprised by the MoMA and Smithsonian websites, though. These websites are very well-curated and are a hidden gem of a resource. The display can be used in a way similar to how I used them in this Padlet, as writing prompts, or for a multitude of other uses in an...