Summative Project

Here is a screen shot of the eBook I created for this class.

Finally! Here is the link to the eBook. You have to click "Buy the book" to see it. I set the price as free.

http://store.blurb.com/ebooks/pedac889ae42ddd73e768

Myself as a teacher (Pre-thinking)

Seeing the forest through the trees....

The gaps I had in my popplets about teacher needs were found in the sections I color coded for myself as a teacher. I even found more information to add to student needs in the same notes.

I also found previously unnoticed influences from my past - my perceptions of cultural expectations!

My goals for students

Larger Categories

1.  Tool box of thinking skills to navigate educational culture
2.  Essential understandings that tie to their out of school lives

Relationships between the categories

1. Exploration and Movement
2. Understanding
3. Sensitivity to internal and external dialogue
4. Resilience
5. Self-Efficacy

Relationships between Myself as a teacher, Influences from the past, Influences from this class

What I have learned about myself as a teacher

1.  I have been influenced by things I can see can't see. I need awareness of these things so I can adjust and moderate my own development
2.  I see myself in my students
3. My needs are similar to the needs of my students
4. My goals for my students are related to developing the self-awareness of their needs within the context of their world so they take ownership of their development into self-actualized individuals 
5. Teaching is part of my development

Influences from this class (pre-thinking)

 

Category #1 : Roles of Teachers

1. Facilitators of interconnected group of humans
2. Transform how students think by encouraging reflective thinking and creative development
3. Validate the needs of students
•  psychological needs
• aesthetic needs - modes of learning
• intellectual needs
• social needs
4.  Be problem finders

(sub) Category #2: My needs as a teacher

1. I need to physically move as I teach
2. I need to do research about questioning techniques so I can foster students curousity
3. I need to have a personal connection with my students, I think I am empathetic by nature, and it helps to understand them
4. To assess my needs as a teacher, because this is all I have!

(sub) Category #3: Needs of Students

1. Validate the way they learn
2. Have ownership over their learning
3. Toolbox of thinking skills
4. Resilience that will help them in multiple climates, and to take risks
5. Appropriate environment to meet psychological needs

(sub) Category #4 Nature of Creativity
1. Depends on cognitive ingredients, genetic or learned
2. Process can be internally or externally motivated; base level of technical/conceptual understanding needed for elaboration to occur
3. Needs a conducive environment - one that is psychologically safe

Relationships between the categories

1.  Emphasis on process
2.  Emphasis on relationship
3.  Emphasis on motivation
4.  Importance of unseen forces
5. Importance of thinking skills, emphasis on creative and problem solving behaviors

Relationships between Influences from this class and Influences from my past

1.  Motivation
2.  Development
3.  Creative Behaviors
4.  Needs
5.  Sense of causality - Relationships
6.  Process

What have I learned about influences from this class?

1. My role as a teacher depends on being truthful about my needs and the needs of the students
2. My motivations and students' motivations are connected to basic human needs that we all have
3. Creativity and problem solving are basic human needs
4. Conditions for self-actualization can be facilitated by a teacher - self-actualization depends on the development of awareness of personal needs and strategies to meet those needs
5. Deeper understanding of Maslow's Hiearchy of Needs

"What motivates behavior? According to humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow, our actions are motivated in order achieve certain needs. "
source : http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/hierarchyneeds.htm

 

Influences from the Past (pre-thinking)

Larger Categories

1. Types of Educators
• formal/informal
• childhood/adult
• authority figure/peer
• external/internal
• human/non-human
• academic/non-academic
• seen/unseen
2. Good Teachers
•  social/emotional needs - coping strategies
• relevant to personal interests
• allowed exploration
• facilitated, not dictated development
• enhanced development of  problem solving abilities
• engaged in two way dialogue with students
3. Bad Teachers
• objectivist teaching - one way dialogue, power hierarchy
• did not validate personal interests
• increased risk factors - opposite direction of developing resiliency in students
• no personal interest in students

Relationships/Connections between the categories

1.   Student interests and exploration
2.   Resiliency and self-efficacy
3.   Developmental appropriateness
4.   Relationships

What have I learned about my educational history?

1. There is more importance in interpersonal relationships than I previously admitted.
2. The attributes of my good teachers are mirrored in my Week 9 modification of my goals
3. It is important for me that education motivates, facilitates, validates, and advocates.
4. Good teachers complement student interests and development
5. Good teachers problem based learning

 What questions do I still have?
1. Can a negative environment stimulate creative development? Can external chaos act as a trigger for disequilibrium? Can the disequilibrium be stabilized by finding unusual connections in the chaos? Could this process be a coping strategy transferable to other problem solving situations - ergo a creative individual?

Piaget, Education, And Creativity

Ultimately he concluded that children's reasoning power was in no way flawed -- on the contrary it was often as good as many adult scientists! However, children's limited life experience meant that they had not amassed and processed enough information about the natural and social world (nor imbibed the same biases) to come to the same conclusions that adults did.

But Piaget did not conclude that children should, ergo, be force-fed more facts at an earlier age. In fact he believed quite the opposite: that such force-feeding would condition children to expect the answers to come from outside themselves, robbing them of creative initiative. He also believed that adults must exercise caution about correcting children's "mistaken notions." If done too harshly, or in a condescending manner, such correcting shamed them into intellectual passivity, causing them to abandon their innate urge to figure things out for themselves, and to come up with new and creative ideas.

http://www.nndb.com/people/359/000094077/

Qualitative research - phase one - What themes are present in my writing?

Cmap #1: Roles of Teachers and Students

Cmap #2: Environment, Motivation, and Identity

To begin the qualitative research based on this blog, I first went through and highlighted words and phrases that seemed significant to me. I did not verbalize any standards for significance before highlighting, I was going by gut feeling. The ideas that were floating around in my head before starting this process were the universality of change and movement, and the importance of systems thinking. 

I originally wrote ideas on note cards and sorted them on my kitchen counter. I liked that system better than the CMaps I have posted. It was easier to see the interconnections between different categories in real space. I used Cmap to have a representation to post on this blog. CMap is limited by screen size so I have posted two Cmaps. There are points of overlap between the two maps that would make it unified if I could post something that big. Then again, if size weren't an issue, I could have just posted a photo of my kitchen counter!

The themes that popped up during this process were:

1. The role of teachers
2. The role of students
3. How motivation affects creativity process
4. How culture and environment affect motivation
5. How teachers can affect environment
6. How culture can affect teachers
7. How education affects identity
8. The interconnection between students and teachers

Keywords: Roles, culture, environment, motivation, education, identity, interconnection

Right now I am seizing upon an overall systems view of education, socialization, and identity formation, with a recognition of movement and interrelationships.

Updated Representation of My Teaching Heritage

The Joy of Teaching

At the beginning of the semester I visualized my teaching heritage as a chocolate chip cookie. My influences were categorized as the ingredients in the cookie. Bad influences were cat fur/contaminants.

For my final lineage representation, I am expanding my original idea to become a digital cookbook. My concept of my teaching lineage has morphed into the concept of a hand-me-down cook book - a book that has been passed down from generation to generation, has been written on, been altered by ingredients during the cooking process, had recipe cards added, and is falling apart. The worn cookbook is converted to a  digital format to preserve it for future generations. Changes to the digital cookbook in the future would of course be expected to be digital edits, computer text, scanned or digital photos, and inserted videos.