Wow! Creating a website is challenging yet so rewarding. I think one of the hardest parts for me was deciding the template. Being that I am an individual who struggles with making decisions, I have to admit I tried a handful of different themes over the course of a few days. However, once I stuck to a theme, I was finally on track towards making it how I want it to look. I found that the most rewarding part is the moment after adding everything in the editing view and going back to how the site really looks. I love seeing the changes and finding new things to make the appearance fit my liking.
The next thing I want to discuss this week is the two things we watched. First I want to discuss the “Most Likely to Succeed” documentary. I found myself so motivated by some of the teachers featured in the film. Their unwavering confidence in their student’s abilities was so powerful to me! The fact that as soon as they met their students, they immediately knew their potential and started to figure out a way to get their students from point a to point b. When I think about the best teachers I had growing up, It was always the ones who believed in my success and helped me get there. I found that this documentary captured that relationship so well. I also want to make a note about the school it was filmed in. Never in my life did I think a school like that existed and I am in awe of its values and beliefs. Going into teaching, this film had changed my perspective on assessment and what it means for a student to understand something and how that looks. I think this school’s idea to let students be creative in the way they express what they’ve learned is really interesting. Although it is different from the education I received in high school, I can’t help but think about what I would have done and how I would have done attending a school like that.
Moreover, Jeff Hopkin’s TED Talk on Education as if People Mattered was also a very inspiring story. As Jeff Hopkins Explains, Learning is already in us. Simply put, It needs to be sparked and nurtured into a flame. His teaching that how in education we need to make sense of the world outside of ourselves was a great perspective to see. Additionally, His questioning of where is the focus is on in education and if it’s knowing about or simply knowing was eye-opening. I like his openness and urgency about the need to make distinctions between getting information from somewhere and actually knowing it in regards to curriculum and student understanding. His ideas about re-organizing learning into very broad high-level competencies Truly got me thinking. As a future teacher, his push for providing opportunities for deep personal inquiries and emergent learning is something I hope to perhaps reciprocate in a classroom.
Sources
Photo 1: Erik Mclean (unspash)
Photo 2: Aaron Burden (unsplash)