Course Contract #4

What are you doing well?

I feel that at this point, I did much better keeping up with assignments and staying organized. I felt much better at the end of the semester when I had all of my "required" work completed before the due date.

What are you not doing well?

Though I kept everything organized on paper, I don't personally feel that I kept everything "organized" in my head. Or probably better said, my automaticity on the things that I have learned I feel needs much work. Example, our final test, I studied for it, then I freaked and blacked out on the final. Where as, if I worked on staying and keeping organized mentally, I probably would have felt more comfortable while taking the final.

Are you making sufficient progress on your goals?

I feel that with my overall goals from the start of the semester that I did make sufficient and worthwhile progress. Though, I feel that I am only hitting the tip of the iceberg,

List specific things you need to change in order to meet your goals

As I continue with my education and go on to teaching, I feel it imperative to continue working on the goals that I have imposed on myself. Even retailoring them to other classes and my profession. I need to continue to learn about educational psychology so that I will better understand my students and which stages they are going through and so forth. The better that I understand the psychological mind set of my students, the better I will be able to educate them and help them become more effective learners.

Personal Learning Theory

What?

According to the results of my test, my learning theory is more like Bruner. Whom talks about a "Community of Learners."

• Piaget's Cognitive Development -
• Vygotsky's Cognitive Development -
• Erikson's Psychosocial Development -
• Kohlberg's Moral Development -
• Goleman's Emotional Intelligence
• Information Processing
• Knowledge Construction and Higher-order thinking
• Behaviorism
• Social Cognitivism
• Group and Individual Differences
• Motivation

So what?

This is a tougher one than I thought it was going to be. I believe that people learn from what is around them, their culture and family settings. I would have to say that I am in agreement with Bruner & Vygotsky. People learn from what they experience in their lives. Everyone is different. My views and they way I learned things growing up is totally different from the guys next to me. This could be argued that this is some type of cultural lens, though, doesn't our culture have a great effect on the way we learn? I know that it had effected the way I learn. At the same token, looking at it through a different perspective, I am a person that learns through modeling, and watching somebody do it first. Then I follow. Again, everyone learns differently, though I strongly feel that a person's cultural influence effects the way that they learn and view different aspects of life.

Now what?

(1)How will your theory translate into teaching strategies in your future classroom?

I feel that the way that I view how people learn will benefit my students greatly. By understanding where they come from and by knowing that everyone learns differently will help me better realize my students strengths and weaknesses. What might be easier for one student, might very well be difficult for another, in this instance I would need to realize that I would either have to teach the concept a different way, or help that student individually. At the same time, I need to stay on my toes and continue to educate myself in my field. The more that I know as an educator, the more effective I will in teaching, and adapting my lessons to cater to different learning styles.

(2) What are the next steps for you to take in including topics in Ed Psych that you would like to learn more about and areas in which you need to improve

Even though I have learned a great deal about Educational Psychology, I know that I still have much more to improve on. I would say that my next step would be to actually make a list on this aspects that I would like to improve on, once this is done, I would like to actually implement a plan on how I could use it either in my daily activities or in my future classroom and then put them into practice. I feel that one of the best ways to learn and retain something is to actually do it & put it into practice.

Multiple Intelligence Project

According to Gardner's Multiple Intelligences Survey, my strongest intelligence is Music. Which I was hoping would be the outcome since I am a musician. To integrate this with my Multiple Intelligences Project, I decided to use a little bit of technology and create a Jeopardy game which would incorporate questions covering material that a music class would typically cover. I like this project because in a classroom setting, I strongly feel that it would encourage collaborative learning. To play this game, which could easily be used as a review for whichever unit you are doing, the class needs to be split into two different groups. As the groups take turns, and are presented a question, they would need to collaborate to decide on an answer. This helps with retrieval or distributed practice if using this for a review of some sort. Hopefully, it would also help with the automaticity of the students knowledge. In short, I believe that this is a fun, yet very effective way to review material with your students and get away from the every day monotonous rigors of classroom life.