The Scope of Education: Refresh Yourself
By: Angela Sonntag/Johnson
With every course I have taken and with every learned theory or skill, my brain and computer have been creating new file folders for this plethora of new information. These folders that I work with are more than just a storage place for my learning over the past year and half in Michigan State University’s Master of Arts in Education program; they are a permanent resource for me to use as I continue to learn. So now as I fumble through the multiple folders storing my years worth of studying, discussing, thinking, learning, and applying, I can finally combine all of them into one large folder I call Rethinking Thinking.
This new folder is a synthesis of my learning through my master’s program, which has allowed me to experience each course individually and now finally as a combined experience. The word synthesis has a vague meaning, but is useful for its ability to be used in a variety of situations. For me, synthesis of my master’s program is my fusion of 11 courses into a completely new entity, which is now one large instrument that I can apply to my future in teaching and learning. Even though I am now synthesizing my experience from the master’s program, there are definitely a few courses that have made an extremely large impact on who I am becoming as an educator. These courses are all different in their focus, but all very important in allowing me to explore how I can enhance myself as an educator and learner. Through CEP 818: Creativity in Teaching and Learning, CEP 832: Educating Students with Challenging Behavior, and ED 870: Capstone Seminar I have been able to better understand that, “A synthetic education requires only that we change how we teach,” because “The purpose of education should be the active process of learning and creating rather than the passive acquisition of facts,” (Root-Bernstein, p. 316).
One of my first classes in the Fall of 2009 was Dr. Punya Mishra’s CEP 818: Creativity in Teaching and Learning. This course was not a requirement for the completion of my degree, but part of an elective credit for my secondary focus on Technology and Learning. My initial reasoning for choosing Technology and Learning as secondary focus was, because I knew how important the use of technology was becoming in schools and I wanted to be a part of it. Yet, I never knew just what I would be doing in this course and just how much of an impact it would have on my future goals. Dr. Mishra’s course in the beginning was a bit overwhelming, because almost the entire course took place on his own blog space/website. This site and the use of blogging were very new to me and I was very apprehensive about how I would be successful in using such a new tool. I had just started becoming comfortable with the Angel format of MSU’s online program and so the transition was not easy. Yet, after many long nights of working and manipulating the different elements of the website, I eventually learned how to maximize my learning experience through the unique capabilities of an online learning “classroom.” Through the use of posting blogs, responding to peers on the blogs, creating and posting online projects, essays, and photographs I was exploring a whole new world of creativity with my learning.
Not only was I learning how to utilize my online classroom, I was also having fun exploring the many other online programs and websites that can help yield a more creative learning experience. The creative side of this course is what I think helped open my mind to the change I needed as a teacher. Our main course text was Sparks of Genius by Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein and it was a major catalyst in pushing my mind creatively. Sparks of Genius is composed of 16 different chapters and 13 different cognitive tools to expand and open up the minds of those in education on how to create a more imaginative mode of thinking for students and their teachers. At first I thought, that “Yes, I am a creative teacher. I let them use their hands and create things, we listen to songs, and we do lots of creative things.” Yet, what I found was that it takes more than just creating projects to allow students and myself to be creative; I needed to do so much more.
Through the learning and creative process of CEP 818 I learned important ideas such as observing, imaging, abstracting, recognizing patterns, analogizing, body thinking, empathizing, dimensional thinking, modeling, playing, transforming, and finally synthesizing. From these modules and thinking tools, I was more aware of how to take these dormant skills we all posses and train my brain to explore them on a daily basis. This course has impacted my thinking in such a way that it is no longer enough to just teach so that my students to acquire information. I want my students to create, publish, and explore their learning in a meaningful and applicable way so that they are becoming the creators and innovators of the future. Root-Bernstein says it the clearest, “Innovation is always transdisciplinary and multimodal. The future will therefore depend upon our ability to create synthetic understanding by integrating all ways of knowing,” (p. 314).
After an amazing first experience with online learning and exploring creativity with CEP 818, I was again completely engrossed in my Spring 2010 course of CEP 832: Educating Students with Challenging Behavior. When I started this course I was in the middle of my third year of teaching and was finally starting to feel comfortable in my “teacher” shoes. Yet, this 2009-2010 school year was extremely difficult for me, because I had some very serious and difficult students with behavioral issues. While working with my emotionally disabled students with Oppositional Defiance Disorder, passive aggressive, hostile aggressive, and defiant behaviors I was definitely stretched to my emotional capacity on how to handle such situations. In the beginning of the year I felt more like a warden than a teacher, but once I started CEP 832 I began to learn more about the background of these behaviors.
Once I learned about what may cause these behaviors in my students, I was better able to understand and open myself up to the new skills, strategies, and interventions discussed in CEP 832. Not only did this course allow me to explore different challenging behaviors in students and how to effectively work with these students, but it also taught me what not to do. I think reflecting on ineffective approaches initially and evaluating my own strategies openly was an extremely valuable experience in this course. I, for so long, was doing what I had thought was the right thing and seemed lost as to how I was to handle so many new and challenging experiences with these particular students. The support group, as I often referred to them as, was a great way to collaborate, discuss, and reflect on the many challenging behaviors my group in CEP 832 was facing as teachers. We were able to work on vignettes together, ask for advice and support, report back on our case study projects, and exchange techniques from the book or our own personal experience that have been successful in the classroom.
Through CEP 832 I think I grew immensely as an educator, because I was able to see my own faults and improve upon my strategies for educating students with challenging behavior. Too often society views teachers as those who simply teach the basic reading, writing, and math that children need, but they frequently forget that we are also socializing society’s youth. I am not just a teacher of academics, but also a mentor and social coach for students who need that extra support in order to be successful citizens. That is exactly what CEP 832 has allowed me to become a part of and it is something that I am continuing to work on today. Therefore it is now much clearer to me that teachers must be, “willing to invest significantly in the socialization role along with their other teaching roles, and thus go the extra mile in working with problem students,” (Brophy, p. 7).
As the path to finally earning my Master’s Degree in the Arts of Education came to an end there was one last course that deeply impacted my learning and my future. ED 870: Capstone Seminar is this course and the very last piece to the puzzle before graduation from Michigan State University. My initial thoughts about this course were about what would the culminating task be for me to do in order to display my growth and learning as an educator? Well, I was delightfully surprised when I learned that I had to create a portfolio as part of my final assignment in the program. The idea of creating a portfolio is something that I have done many years ago when graduating from my undergraduate program, but this time it was a little different. With ED 870, I was to create an electronic portfolio using a website or blog format to display what my Master’s degree experience encompassed. If this assignment would have been given to me 18 months ago I might have shivered with fear and anxiety, but this time I felt differently.
The new and improved Angela Sonntag was ready and excited to take on this project. I felt completely different about incorporating technology with my learning process, because I had been climbing that staircase of 21st century skills for almost two years and I was equipped with all of the right tools. I had worked with multiple online educational interfaces, covered a variety of topics through my 11 courses, and was ready to reflect on the process to synthesize my learning. I knew that my last course would take a lot of searching within myself to truly see what I had learned about being an educator and being a student. It was actually exciting to think about how I would be able to go through each course, evaluate my experiences, and then reveal everything I have learned. Despite my initial confidence and excitement though, there was one small problem in creating this Master’s portfolio; I had never created a website before!
With the swirling pool of emotions I experienced at the beginning of ED 870, it was comforting to know that I would have a House of people to work closely with. I was able to explore the different experiences my House Group had with creating websites and working with technology and it was refreshing to have a variety of comfort levels. Through each module we were able to discuss what we had done as we began to build our portfolio and offer bits of wisdom to each other about what worked well and what didn’t. As a professional learning community, I felt comfortable in the fact that I had people looking out for my best interest as I did for them. Along with my House members, I was thrilled to explore the very informative modules about how to create our portfolios from the ground up. I was given creative freedom to choose where, what, and how I wanted to present my portfolio which was even more reassuring that the process would be successful.
As I developed my website and portfolio I began working with technology significantly more and more each week. The more time I spent modifying each page, uploading artifacts, and tinkering with layouts, the more I wanted to share what I was doing with others. I began talking with our director of technology at my elementary school and explored different ideas on how to use my experience from my Master’s program and integrate it with my elementary classroom. It was a simultaneous experience, because as each page developed for ED 870, so would another idea for a classroom website or project. I began checking out flip cameras, iPods, laptops, and Smart Boards constantly and started making them a normal part of our learning process. Before I knew it I was spending all of my free time switching back and forth from my portfolio page, to my classroom page, and to other educational forums like www.onfizz.org. I couldn’t believe how my passion for teaching was growing and that technology was the catalyst for it all. I began to feel a renewal in myself as a teacher and student, which made me want to share this experience with my own students.
Sharing all of my hard work with the world through my online portfolio has created a very overwhelming sense of joy and pride, which is why I want my students to feel the same way. With each course I have taken and new learned skill, I have taken another step towards my new goal of incorporating technology into the classroom. If continuing my education and exploring 21st century skills has increased my own motivation, than I know it can do the same for my students. I want the same synthesis of education that has happened to me to be something that each child I work with can accomplish as well. We live in a world that is rapidly changing and if adults and children alike are to keep up, then we need to forever keep that “student” role in mind and never stop learning. I know now that my future as a learner will continue to grow, because I never want to stop feeling the thrill of doing something new with technology and teaching. Therefore my file folders of knowledge and experience that I keep in my mind and on my computer may need an extra external hard drive, because I plan to allow it to continue to grow exponentially. I am changing the way I learn and the way I teach in order to adapt to the world we live in so that my students too can be successful once they leave my classroom and become the innovators of tomorrow.
This new folder is a synthesis of my learning through my master’s program, which has allowed me to experience each course individually and now finally as a combined experience. The word synthesis has a vague meaning, but is useful for its ability to be used in a variety of situations. For me, synthesis of my master’s program is my fusion of 11 courses into a completely new entity, which is now one large instrument that I can apply to my future in teaching and learning. Even though I am now synthesizing my experience from the master’s program, there are definitely a few courses that have made an extremely large impact on who I am becoming as an educator. These courses are all different in their focus, but all very important in allowing me to explore how I can enhance myself as an educator and learner. Through CEP 818: Creativity in Teaching and Learning, CEP 832: Educating Students with Challenging Behavior, and ED 870: Capstone Seminar I have been able to better understand that, “A synthetic education requires only that we change how we teach,” because “The purpose of education should be the active process of learning and creating rather than the passive acquisition of facts,” (Root-Bernstein, p. 316).
One of my first classes in the Fall of 2009 was Dr. Punya Mishra’s CEP 818: Creativity in Teaching and Learning. This course was not a requirement for the completion of my degree, but part of an elective credit for my secondary focus on Technology and Learning. My initial reasoning for choosing Technology and Learning as secondary focus was, because I knew how important the use of technology was becoming in schools and I wanted to be a part of it. Yet, I never knew just what I would be doing in this course and just how much of an impact it would have on my future goals. Dr. Mishra’s course in the beginning was a bit overwhelming, because almost the entire course took place on his own blog space/website. This site and the use of blogging were very new to me and I was very apprehensive about how I would be successful in using such a new tool. I had just started becoming comfortable with the Angel format of MSU’s online program and so the transition was not easy. Yet, after many long nights of working and manipulating the different elements of the website, I eventually learned how to maximize my learning experience through the unique capabilities of an online learning “classroom.” Through the use of posting blogs, responding to peers on the blogs, creating and posting online projects, essays, and photographs I was exploring a whole new world of creativity with my learning.
Not only was I learning how to utilize my online classroom, I was also having fun exploring the many other online programs and websites that can help yield a more creative learning experience. The creative side of this course is what I think helped open my mind to the change I needed as a teacher. Our main course text was Sparks of Genius by Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein and it was a major catalyst in pushing my mind creatively. Sparks of Genius is composed of 16 different chapters and 13 different cognitive tools to expand and open up the minds of those in education on how to create a more imaginative mode of thinking for students and their teachers. At first I thought, that “Yes, I am a creative teacher. I let them use their hands and create things, we listen to songs, and we do lots of creative things.” Yet, what I found was that it takes more than just creating projects to allow students and myself to be creative; I needed to do so much more.
Through the learning and creative process of CEP 818 I learned important ideas such as observing, imaging, abstracting, recognizing patterns, analogizing, body thinking, empathizing, dimensional thinking, modeling, playing, transforming, and finally synthesizing. From these modules and thinking tools, I was more aware of how to take these dormant skills we all posses and train my brain to explore them on a daily basis. This course has impacted my thinking in such a way that it is no longer enough to just teach so that my students to acquire information. I want my students to create, publish, and explore their learning in a meaningful and applicable way so that they are becoming the creators and innovators of the future. Root-Bernstein says it the clearest, “Innovation is always transdisciplinary and multimodal. The future will therefore depend upon our ability to create synthetic understanding by integrating all ways of knowing,” (p. 314).
After an amazing first experience with online learning and exploring creativity with CEP 818, I was again completely engrossed in my Spring 2010 course of CEP 832: Educating Students with Challenging Behavior. When I started this course I was in the middle of my third year of teaching and was finally starting to feel comfortable in my “teacher” shoes. Yet, this 2009-2010 school year was extremely difficult for me, because I had some very serious and difficult students with behavioral issues. While working with my emotionally disabled students with Oppositional Defiance Disorder, passive aggressive, hostile aggressive, and defiant behaviors I was definitely stretched to my emotional capacity on how to handle such situations. In the beginning of the year I felt more like a warden than a teacher, but once I started CEP 832 I began to learn more about the background of these behaviors.
Once I learned about what may cause these behaviors in my students, I was better able to understand and open myself up to the new skills, strategies, and interventions discussed in CEP 832. Not only did this course allow me to explore different challenging behaviors in students and how to effectively work with these students, but it also taught me what not to do. I think reflecting on ineffective approaches initially and evaluating my own strategies openly was an extremely valuable experience in this course. I, for so long, was doing what I had thought was the right thing and seemed lost as to how I was to handle so many new and challenging experiences with these particular students. The support group, as I often referred to them as, was a great way to collaborate, discuss, and reflect on the many challenging behaviors my group in CEP 832 was facing as teachers. We were able to work on vignettes together, ask for advice and support, report back on our case study projects, and exchange techniques from the book or our own personal experience that have been successful in the classroom.
Through CEP 832 I think I grew immensely as an educator, because I was able to see my own faults and improve upon my strategies for educating students with challenging behavior. Too often society views teachers as those who simply teach the basic reading, writing, and math that children need, but they frequently forget that we are also socializing society’s youth. I am not just a teacher of academics, but also a mentor and social coach for students who need that extra support in order to be successful citizens. That is exactly what CEP 832 has allowed me to become a part of and it is something that I am continuing to work on today. Therefore it is now much clearer to me that teachers must be, “willing to invest significantly in the socialization role along with their other teaching roles, and thus go the extra mile in working with problem students,” (Brophy, p. 7).
As the path to finally earning my Master’s Degree in the Arts of Education came to an end there was one last course that deeply impacted my learning and my future. ED 870: Capstone Seminar is this course and the very last piece to the puzzle before graduation from Michigan State University. My initial thoughts about this course were about what would the culminating task be for me to do in order to display my growth and learning as an educator? Well, I was delightfully surprised when I learned that I had to create a portfolio as part of my final assignment in the program. The idea of creating a portfolio is something that I have done many years ago when graduating from my undergraduate program, but this time it was a little different. With ED 870, I was to create an electronic portfolio using a website or blog format to display what my Master’s degree experience encompassed. If this assignment would have been given to me 18 months ago I might have shivered with fear and anxiety, but this time I felt differently.
The new and improved Angela Sonntag was ready and excited to take on this project. I felt completely different about incorporating technology with my learning process, because I had been climbing that staircase of 21st century skills for almost two years and I was equipped with all of the right tools. I had worked with multiple online educational interfaces, covered a variety of topics through my 11 courses, and was ready to reflect on the process to synthesize my learning. I knew that my last course would take a lot of searching within myself to truly see what I had learned about being an educator and being a student. It was actually exciting to think about how I would be able to go through each course, evaluate my experiences, and then reveal everything I have learned. Despite my initial confidence and excitement though, there was one small problem in creating this Master’s portfolio; I had never created a website before!
With the swirling pool of emotions I experienced at the beginning of ED 870, it was comforting to know that I would have a House of people to work closely with. I was able to explore the different experiences my House Group had with creating websites and working with technology and it was refreshing to have a variety of comfort levels. Through each module we were able to discuss what we had done as we began to build our portfolio and offer bits of wisdom to each other about what worked well and what didn’t. As a professional learning community, I felt comfortable in the fact that I had people looking out for my best interest as I did for them. Along with my House members, I was thrilled to explore the very informative modules about how to create our portfolios from the ground up. I was given creative freedom to choose where, what, and how I wanted to present my portfolio which was even more reassuring that the process would be successful.
As I developed my website and portfolio I began working with technology significantly more and more each week. The more time I spent modifying each page, uploading artifacts, and tinkering with layouts, the more I wanted to share what I was doing with others. I began talking with our director of technology at my elementary school and explored different ideas on how to use my experience from my Master’s program and integrate it with my elementary classroom. It was a simultaneous experience, because as each page developed for ED 870, so would another idea for a classroom website or project. I began checking out flip cameras, iPods, laptops, and Smart Boards constantly and started making them a normal part of our learning process. Before I knew it I was spending all of my free time switching back and forth from my portfolio page, to my classroom page, and to other educational forums like www.onfizz.org. I couldn’t believe how my passion for teaching was growing and that technology was the catalyst for it all. I began to feel a renewal in myself as a teacher and student, which made me want to share this experience with my own students.
Sharing all of my hard work with the world through my online portfolio has created a very overwhelming sense of joy and pride, which is why I want my students to feel the same way. With each course I have taken and new learned skill, I have taken another step towards my new goal of incorporating technology into the classroom. If continuing my education and exploring 21st century skills has increased my own motivation, than I know it can do the same for my students. I want the same synthesis of education that has happened to me to be something that each child I work with can accomplish as well. We live in a world that is rapidly changing and if adults and children alike are to keep up, then we need to forever keep that “student” role in mind and never stop learning. I know now that my future as a learner will continue to grow, because I never want to stop feeling the thrill of doing something new with technology and teaching. Therefore my file folders of knowledge and experience that I keep in my mind and on my computer may need an extra external hard drive, because I plan to allow it to continue to grow exponentially. I am changing the way I learn and the way I teach in order to adapt to the world we live in so that my students too can be successful once they leave my classroom and become the innovators of tomorrow.
So hit refresh and find your new motivation...
Bibliography
Brophy, Jere. Teaching Problem Students. New York: The Guilford Press, 1996.
Root-Berstein, Robert and Michele. Sparks of Genius. New York: Mariner Books, 1999.