Panal Appreciation

First of all, let me just say I thought the panel was great.  I know a couple of people already said that, but I really enjoyed it.  Obviously, it gave us a chance to ask questions and hear from new teachers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it had to be such a friendly, optimistic event, which it was!  I left feeling actually positive and excited about teaching, and I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but I feel that a lot of teacher training tends to be more depressing.  It really meant a lot how optimistic each of the visitors was to talk about their job and share with future teachers.

           That being said, there were couple of things that stood out to me from the panel discussions that I think complimented some of the learning we’ve been doing this semester.  During the smaller group discussion, my group asked Ryan Dolan and Cynthia White about curriculum planning and how they start/go about it.  Ryan then gave us his spin on backwards planning: boomerang planning.  Similar to backwards planning, it considers first what the final product will be, but then you start jump back to the beginning of the unit because the semester is probably starting in a few days and you have to know what your doing!  Ryan also emphasized that while he would plan for the final product, he would often need to be reconsidering and adjusting it based on how things actually were completed during the unit.  I really appreciated his reinterpretation of the backward planning design because it was meant to be realistic, for how much a teacher can really do at a time, and also placed the importance on being flexible for your students.  (wow between boomerang design and Aaron’s vocab basketball, I can see a lot of methods texts coming from our ranks!)

           From the whole class discussion one of my favorite things to hear, honestly, was when they had different opinions about the same point.  For some reason I found this strangely reassuring.  Something about hearing the good and bad of each place makes me think that no matter what we can make each environment work for us.  There will be trade offs, but you just figure out how to function in each environment.  And we will use what we learned in EE and adjust it as necessary(although maybe the first couple times will be horrendous) for our context.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! See you next week for our last classes before student teaching!