6712 Course Reflection

When I look back at this course, the main thing that I took from it was how much has changed in education over a relatively short period of time. I looked at the definition of literacy when I went to school compared to the list of new literacies that we need to teach to our students in the future. There is a huge difference. So looking at this, how could we continue to teach the same way that we have in the past. Teachers must be willing to change to prepare our students for the future. This being said, do we just use some new media or technology to continue using the same methods we used in the past, or do we incorporate the use of teaching these new literacies to prepare our students for their lives outside of school. This course has opened my eyes to the skills that will be important to our students and our future students as they leave school. Many of these skills I had been ignoring in my classroom. We fall into a routine in our classrooms. We give our children structure so they know what is expected of them. But much of my classroom structure is repetitive, and I realize that many of my students are not using much researching skills, questioning skills, and problem solving skills in my class. These are the skills that will carry them the furthest in the future. This course has gotten me to begin to develop lessons that will foster these new literacies and give my students repetitions of these literacies that will give them valuable experience that will lead to the mastering of these skills. This will help my students in their jobs and every aspect of their life in the future.

A goal of mine in the future is to research or have some professional development on inquiry based instruction. I feel that inquiry based projects could be very beneficial to my students in the future. I currently have begun to come up with some inquiry based projects, but there are just some things that are still missing in these lessons. I have not used many of these types of lessons in the past, and I am trying to incorporate these into the classroom, but it is hard because I have not done these in the past. I have talked to some of the administration at our school and other teachers, and they have been talking about inquiry based instruction. This leads me to believe that our school will be doing some inquiry based instruction professional development next year during our in-service or early release days. This should lead to more of the teachers in my school experimenting with these types of lessons in the classroom. This should help the teachers collaborate on what they felt worked for them, what did not work, and some problems to look out for. By trying these lessons in my class and making my adjustments from things that I felt the lesson lacked, and by collaborating with my colleagues who are doing the same types of lessons, I hope to develop more inquiry projects that will get my students to use questioning, problem solving, and researching skills that will be important to them in the future. I feel that my students would love these types of lessons, and this should motivate them to work in my class. That would be very important to me, since currently, our students motivation is so low.