Teachers Without Borders/Education for the New Millennium/Reflection and Review

=Course One: Reflection and Review=

Part 1: Introductory Self-Assessment Activity
Before you review the content of Course One by answering the questions in Part 2, we hope that you will take a moment to reflect on your own professional identity by answering the following three questions:


 * 1) WHO AM I? What are some of my most strongly held values, attitudes, and beliefs? What does being a teacher mean to me?
 * 2) WHERE AM I? What is my social, cultural, economic, or political context? What is my classroom/school/region like? What are some of the challenges and opportunities that emerge out of this context?
 * 3) WHAT'S NEXT? What are my Personal Learning Objectives? What am I striving towards? What do I want to accomplish? What kind of support do I need? What kind of support can I provide?

We encourage you to write down your answers and share them with your colleagues in small groups. Then, discuss how your colleagues and the Certificate of Teaching Mastery can contribute to further development of your professional expertise and identity. Also, consider what you can do to support other teachers in your school, region, or country.

Part 2: Review
1. Take a moment to review DR.CROSS. Then, consider the following questions:


 * a) Are these characteristics of education for the new millennium present in your classroom? If so, provide specific examples. If not, how can they be best implemented given the specific context in which you teach (subject matter, class size, availability of resources, curriculum, institutional constraints)?


 * b) Are any of these characteristics more difficult to implement than others? Why? What is needed to overcome these challenges?

2. Take a moment to review the Aspects of Good Teaching. Then, think of how you would help less experienced teachers implement them in their classrooms. What kinds of activities would you suggest? Which one of these aspects would be most challenging to implement by teachers in your country or region? Why? What can be done to change this?

3. Suggest practical ways to implement key aspects of Constructivism in your classroom. As teacher leader, how would you support classroom teachers to ensure that their classrooms become more constructivist?

4. How would you restructure your curriculum so that it revolves around questions and creates an environment that encourages inquiry rather than rote learning? Choose a specific lesson and explain how you would use it to encourage inquiry. How would you engage your students?

5. The section on Learning Styles states that "teachers should design their instruction methods to connect with all four learning styles." Discuss how this could be done in your subject area by giving specific examples that correspond to each of the learning styles.

6. How would you increase the number of right-brain learning activities in your classroom? How can existing methodologies and assessment practices be modified to accommodate right-brain learning?

7. According to Glasser, "if students are not motivated to do their schoolwork, it's because they view schoolwork as irrelevant to their basic human needs." Can you think of aspects of your curriculum that students are likely to perceive as irrelevant? How can this be avoided? What would you do to ensure student engagement?

8. Choose a specific unit or lesson from a subject you presently teach or taught in the past and explain how it could be modified using Vygotsky's views on cognitive development and scaffolding. Explain the advantages of this change. How would it benefit the students?

9. Choose two or three intelligences from Howard Gardner's list of multiple intelligences and design a learning activity for a specific lesson. Then discuss potential assessment strategies for your activities.

Copyright 2008, by the Contributing Authors. Cite/attribute Resource. fred. (2008, June 13). Education for the New Millennium. Retrieved May 04, 2010, from TWB Courseware Web site. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/3.0/88x31.png