Addendum to Week 6- I learned an important skill

I believe in order to learn how to teach, you must first learn how to learn. In order for any learning to occur, the learner has to open his or her mind to receiving information in many forms. The opening T-shirt project required me to distill very crucial parts of my life and my career into 4 representative images. That was tough to do but I accomplished it by focusing on doing it. The WebQuest will prove to be a similar experience: the task being assigned must be completed but the journey will be a unique experience for each person. Group presentations require us to use skills that some of us don't use often or easily: communication and collaboration skills but which are CRUCIAL in the professional world of teaching. These tasks are giving us a controlled environment within which to experiment with our own strengths and weaknesses and develop all of them. Our class, this last month, has given me and my classmates an opportunity to learn with guidance and then learn independently awaiting feedback. The module has made me enlightened the direct instruction strategy in a very complete way. Despite the cliche, my eyes have been opened with the terminology and procedures relating to direct instruction.

I have realized some professional growth as well. While I substitute teach, I find that I default to using direct instruction methods. I did that in past years but I never knew what it was called; I just did it naturally. I say "default" because I am in no way prepared to move the students out of the direct instruction format as a substitute teacher. I have been a better substitute teacher now that I am familiar with this strategy. Once I learn the other strategies, I will be able to try to use those as well, even while substitute teaching.