It is the end of Block 2 and as I reflect back I recall that many thing were learned. My inquiry from Block 1 was “what are the things I need to know to be successful.” It is a rather broad inquiry, but I prefer not to narrow my focus. I have found from personal experience that keeping my eyes and ears open to learning experiences cues my attention in the direction of areas that I am lacking or areas that I need to pursue in the future. This opening of the mind has served my learning well in the past. Due to limited word count, I will not be able to include all of these areas that I deem to be essential for my current and future learning, so I will only highlight a few below.

In Assessment and Motivation 421 one of the things we learned from Katie White’s book “Softening the Edges” was that “the learning continuum is an articulation of a progression of skills and understandings inherent in learning goals” (White, 2017). In order to anticipate stages of learning, we must backwards plan from the “goal” of the learning to unpack the information or skills that must be addressed and learned beforehand to effectively serve the student’s education. Through this book we also learned that preassessment is necessary in order to “honor students’ prior knowledge and skills before beginning a learning experience” (White, 2017). Before beginning learning activities, clarifying learning intentions and purpose is essential in order to ensure that the student is completing learning activities with the goal in mind, otherwise “we may end up with products that completely miss the mark” (White, 2017). I think Katie White says it best when she outlines the learning continuum as being four stages: “(1) building readiness, (2) exploring the learning goal, (3) clarifying proficiency, and (4) enriching understanding” (White, 2017). She tells us that if we backwards plan with learning goals in mind and make sure to clarify these learning goals as the purpose of the activities to the learners, we will help to keep the learners on track and scaffold our way to success.

From Parker Palmer’s book The Courage to Teach I took a very resonant message. While he quoted a message that is prevalent in many verses of the bible, “be not afraid,” it was the story that Palmer connected to these words that truly left an impression.

“‘Be not afraid’ does not say that we should not have fears–and if it did, we could dismiss it as an impossible counsel of perfection. Instead, it says that we do not need to be our fears, quite a different proposition” (Palmer, 2017).

Palmer goes on to tell us that he always wished for the day he could not feel fear in his classroom, but he learned with experience and time that that day would never arrive. The overarching message from Palmer is to not let that fear drive you and be the source from which you teach. It separates us from our students and from the learning if we let ourselves become our fear. There will never be a year in which we do not fail. The goal is to rise above the failure and learn from it.

From Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, he reveals to us the negative link between rewards and creative work. This is called the “Sawyer Effect.” In his book, he describes a test in which ten commissioned works and ten non-commissioned works from artists were mixed together and a panel of curators and accomplished artists were asked to assess the creativity and technical skill of the pieces. This panel was not made aware of the study. The results of the study surprised Teresa Amabile, a professor from the Harvard Business School. The results of the study were that all the commissioned works, in which a reward was inherently present, were considered to be less creative. However, the technical quality between commission and non-commissioned were the same. The lesson to take from this experience in differing sources of motivation is that, when one is engaged in creative tasks, attaching a reward to the creative task will be detrimental to the creativity of the task. (Pink, 2009) Daniel Pink tells us that this is not the same when it comes to technical tasks. In his Ted Talk, Pink informs us that rewards have a positive impact on technical or repetitive tasks that require no creative thinking to execute. (Pink, 2009)

From my practicum, the largest weakness I learned I possessed was in one on one communication with students when doing conflict resolution. As someone who is good at conflict resolution in my personal life, this came as a surprise to me. However, when balancing all the balls of my pacing, which had gone down the tubes, and the lack of proficiency with newer music, which I had not anticipated to be so bad for that particular elementary school, I was not in my best place when in the last fifteen minutes of class two students took issue with each other. These two students were from different classrooms but were brought together for Band 6/7. One student was staring at the other, which I had missed during class. The other student had said some things to the staring student which the staring student found slanderous. My solution was to separate them, which caused the slanderous student to become extremely upset. What I learned from this experience is that I should take more time from the greater class to talk to each student one on one before coming up with a solution. My “easy” solution for the class being able to move forward was not the “best” solution for the slanderous student who became very upset at losing their “spot.”

2 Goals for Block 3:
1) Find some books on conflict resolution between children, not adults. Handling and language usage needs improvement.
2) Discover the way to avoid students upset with grades. One lead is the teacher of 421. CLUE: Transparency and clarity of goals and clarity of what is being assessed or will be assessed (aka learning targets) is ESSENTIAL for students to be satisfied with their marks.

Palmer, Parker. (2017). The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. Jossey-Brass.

Pink, Daniel. (2009). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Riverhead Books.

Pink, Daniel. (2009, July). The Puzzle of Motivation. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_the_puzzle_of_motivatio n

White, Katie. (2017). Softening the Edges: Assessment Practices That Honor K-12 Teachers and Learners. Solution Tree Press.