The David Theune presentation was fantastic. David is passionate about the profession of teaching and extremely creative when it comes to assignments. His creativity and passion for teaching were inspiring to me and I really appreciate all of the things he does. He recognized that not all schools are as fortunate as to have access to chrome books and such and made suggestions about what teachers could do to compensate. I love the idea of consulting with other teachers in the building on presenting assignments to each others classes. In addition, I think it is awesome that David invites parents to come to observe class whenever they want. I don't think any of my teachers ever did that and maintaining that parent-teacher relationship is vitally important in the student learning process.
In addition, I believe it is vitally important that teachers become active parts of their community. David took that idea and ran with it, partnering up with local non-profits and giving his students the opportunity to have a positive impact on their community. As a history teacher, this is something that I want to somehow incorporate in my own teaching. I think that teaching history gives me a unique opportunity to help students connect with their community in positive ways and I am open to learning about any method of doing so.
David's connection with technology is great as well. He is an active member of the social media community, maintains a blog, and streams his classes among other things. I think this is a great way to connect with parents and the community and maintain relationships with students while informing them of academic work. I hope to utilize technology in my classroom as effectively as David does in his. It can be a vital tool in student learning if used correctly.
Derek,
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with your posting that the parent-classroom, parent-teacher, and community-classroom connection is vital, I also don't remember my parents having the opportunity to engage in one of my regular classes. David exemplified practices that I would like to employ as a teacher as well. He posed practices that seem transferable between content areas, he is a English/Drama, but you could envision implementing them in history as I did for science. How do you envision using these practices? How do you plan to connect students to the community? With what kinds of projects? I was equally impressed by his creativity and am looking forward to the others.
Hi Derek!
ReplyDeleteLike you, I loved David's presentation. I left just wanting to be as cool as he is. I also like how you are thinking of ways in which to employ some of his practices in your own content area. Do you have any more concrete ideas as of yet?
In addition, I also think it is great the way that David encouraged parent involvement/different audiences for student work. I know my own momma just left me on my own starting in middle school, not necessarily because she wanted to, but because life got in the way and middle school/high school helps facilitate parental involvement far less than grade school seemed to. Especially for not very motivated students, I feel like the type of parental involvement encouraged by David is awesome for the students and would love to incorporate this into my own classes as well. I also really liked the concept of flexible rubrics and would like to explore those further...I would like to use technology close to the extent that he does in a useful way to students, too, but dear lord things seem to break a lot! But anyway, great post!
Derek,
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with your sentiments on Dave. He was very passionate and enthusiastic. I feel like these two characteristics are very important aspects of being an effective teacher. We had a discussion of this in EDUC 402 about the characteristics of an effective teacher. One key idea that encompasses both enthusiasm and passion is care. A teacher needs to CARE about what they are doing in order to be effective. With care because the concern and plight for greatness.
How do you feel about this? Do you care about your future role of teacher? Do you think in caring, the stresses of the job fade?