Assessment

ED 100 - Fall 2019

Elaura Oshiro

I want to become a teacher because I love teaching and I enjoy sharing what I know with
others. Another reason why I want to become a teacher is because I enjoy working with kids and
I like how eager they are to learn and try new things. Even if they make mistakes, they're still
willing to keep trying and keep going. This class has helped me prepare for this goal because it
has taught me different strategies that I could use with students, it taught me different teaching
methods and different ways that I could approach different subjects, and it also taught me how
important it is to involve the community and the parents with their child's learning and school
events.
I really enjoyed learning about different strategies throughout the class period. One
strategy I would like to highlight was when I watched this video in one of the modules that we
had to read. It was about how this teacher wanted her students to build on each other's answers
during discussions. She made a good point in her interview that once a teacher asks a question,
multiple students would raise their hand. As soon as she would choose one student to answer, she
noticed that the rest of the students just shut down their thinking while that one student shared.
Her building method works like this, if a student were to share that Cinderella's magic only lasts
till 12am. She would ask the rest of the students, "what's going to happen at that time? What will
happen to Cinderella?" The teacher's follow up question causes the students to continue listening
while that one student shares. That way when the teacher asks the follow-up question, they're
able to answer the teacher's question while building on their classmate's answer. Learning this
strategy of teaching, made me realize that same problem that the teacher realized. It was to the
point where I thought to myself, that I would like to use this strategy when I become a teacher.
This realization affected me so much that I shared this strategy with my teacher, that I work for,
and told her that if we implemented this strategy in our classroom, it would really benefit the EL
students. Now that I mentioned the EL students, it has crossed my mind that these students
represent our teachers’ understanding that every student is different and that they all learn in
different ways. Which brings up the second thing I learned in this class, which is the multiple
intelligences.
I actually really enjoyed learning about the multiple intelligences. Doing the unit project
while using multiple intelligence as the foundation of the project, was really challenging but
interesting for me to learn. I felt like as of right now learning this was very beneficial for me
because I could use this lesson unit with EL students. I would probably change the topic I chose
for my actual project because it is pin pointed to one language, so I would change it to something
more broad where I can be fair to all the students by doing a culture unit instead. The musical
and the kinesthetic aspect of the multiple intelligences, reminded me of what my teacher is
doing now for her unit plans. She does a “Here There” chant that involves a rhythm, to which the
chant will be wanted in, and hand motions that go with certain words and their definitions. I
think it is pretty clever and something that I will also keep in mind of how I can connect multiple
intelligences during a unit plan. While being a teacher, it is important to focus on strategies to
make learning easier for students and different ways to teach them, but we also need to keep in
mind how important it is to have the community and parents involved with the school and the
students learning.
During week 9 we covered in class about how important it is for community and parent
involvement. This topic really resonated with me because I remembered when I was younger I
would always ask my parents to help me with my homework. I remembered that they didn't want
to help me and they just passed me along to my sisters who passed it around each other. When I
noticed this growing up, I grew up with that mentality that homework was something negative
and no one wants to do negative things, so when nobody wanted to help me do it, I just figured
why should I? Reading module 9 really made me see how important it is that parents are
involved with their child's learning. At first it didn't make sense to me why I had that same
mentality as my parents, until I read this module and I notice it's because children reflect their
parents. If parents are always asking their child how their day in school was and what they had
learned, it shows that the parents are interested in education which will then make the child think
that education is really important. It is also important that the school has community events that
parents and families can go to, because it shows how much the school values their child and that
they're willing to help their child with anything that they need. This month the EL teachers at the
school I work at, is throwing a community event for EL parents. This event will show the parents
how they can help their child with their writing at home and at the end of the day they will offer
the parents and the students free food and free booklets that they can take home. There was this
one time I asked the student to bring out her homework so we could go over the answers and I
noticed that all of her answers were wrong, so naturally I thought that she did it by herself and
we worked on it together. When we went over the 1st answer, it surprised me that she said that
that was her original answer, but she changed it to the wrong answer because her Uncle told her
that she was wrong and that his answer was right. Because of what happened with that student, it
made me realize how important it is to reach out to the families and show them how they can
help and assist their child with their homework or how they can better their reading, speaking,
and writing skills.
When I got into this education class I really wanted to learn how to become a better
teacher. I already knew some things from working in a school but seeing how teachers work is
one thing and learning it for yourself, how you can become a teacher, was something completely
different. During this class I really tried to not look at the forums right away without looking at
the module 1st. I did this because whenever I look at the questions before reading, I tend to skim
through the whole reading for the answers not really taking in the reading’s message entirely. By
reading the model first I was able to understand the full message that the module was trying to
give, so then when I got to the form discussion I knew exactly what I wanted to say with how I
felt rather than just giving an answer to a question. Being a student in school and throughout
college I always had this image in my head about how teachers are supposed to work. In that
image it was all about how you need to teach and care for the students and that was it. After
reading the modules thoroughly, learning different strategies, seeing how I can change lessons to
integrate the multiple intelligences for students, and seeing how important it is to get parent and
community involvement, has now brought a deeper meaning of what a teacher is supposed to do
and what a teacher is. With this new sense of what a teacher is and what a teacher can do, I feel
like I can be that teacher that I have set in my mind.