Books and Daydreams

What part of deriving a learning target was challenging for you?  What connection does the learning target have with assessment? I believe the most difficult part of crafting a learning target is creating a target that is not only concise but accurate. My instinct is often to overwrite things. What I mean by this is I tend to not know exactly when to stop writing. I often find myself having to go back and edit down emails and papers because my natural instinct is to over-explain. With learning targets, you need to create something that is easy for students to understand. it should only be one sentence. This is doable, however, it will often take me a few tries before I get the verbiage in the target just right. I tend to overthink what I'm writing a lot of the time as well. So often I'll construct something perfectly passible but I won't be able to shake the feeling there is something wrong with it. So I try and give myself a limited number of re-reads otherwise I'll ...

I feel that standards are a great way to ensure that our students get a comprehensive and well-rounded education. I personally moved to several different states when I was younger and experienced several different school environments and curriculums. I think standards are a great way to ensure that our students who may have similar experiences don't fall behind their peers or repeat information. As a teacher, I feel standards are a good way to start building lessons as well. It's nice to have a place to start from and look to when I need to create a unit as well. I feel that content standards will help my students get a comprehensive education in all their classes, not just mine. However, I feel having strong standards for English will allow them to develop good communication skills and well as excellent reading and writing skills. I feel that standards are well thought out and are achievable for a large portion of the students we will be working with.  I'm pretty confi...

   I know that I tend to be a more observant learner. I enjoy watching and listening to my classmate's discussions and chiming in only when I feel really compelled to make an observation. When I was younger I was a much more outspoken and inquisitive learner much to the annoyance of several of my teachers. I later found it was easier for me to play the game of school if I was quieter and answered a lot of my questions on my own. I eventually just became genuinely curious about my classmate's ideas and observations. So I liked hanging back and learning about the different thought processes my classmates had. This ended up being one of the major factors in my decision to become an educator.   So, many things have impacted me as a learner. Me, feeling like I was better off answering some of my questions on my own being one. However, I would say my experience with several different schools and districts growing up influenced me the most. My family moved around quite ...