Professional Development

This course focused on helping teaching candidates learn more about effective teaching strategies, including ISTE standards for incorporating technology in the classroom. Major assignments included a book club with other ELA teaching candidates to explore literacy strategies, a reflection on digital citizenship, and a collectino of strategies we'd like to use in our classrooms.

This course focused on developing our teaching philosophy and approach to classroom management. Coursework focused on major philosophies of teaching and management, reflections on how those match our personal beliefs, and small group meetings on how we were applying those ideas in our internship experiences.

This course focused on crafting unit maps and lesson plans that aligned standards, learning objectives, and assessments. A major focus and benefit for me was intentionality with how we introduced material to match our leearning objectives.

This course gave a basis for understanding literacy instruction and its relevance for content areas like Math, Social Studies, and Science. As an ELA teacher, many of the ideas were familiar to me, but it offered a benefit for reflecting on how to incorporate content area knowledge into my course to foster connections between student course work. The course also included specific background on Dyslexia education in accordance with Georgia certification requirements.

This course offered a background on laws that govern teaching students with special educaiton needs, including how to write and implement IEP and 504 plans. A major benefit from the class was exploring how to work with a co-teacher in a general education environment to meet accomodations for special education students.

On the job experience applying our coursework in a teaching environment. Rather than student teaching, I fulfilled this requirment during my first full year of teaching at Peachtree Ridge. This course also included an additional component exploring how to incorporate AI in our classrooms.

Forthcoming

Forthcoming

Forthcoming

Forthcoming

Taught by Dr. Lindsey Harding. This course explored strategies for providing effective feedback on student writing. We focused on helping students connect large themes and adding clarity to their writing, as opposed to correcting minor grammar mistakes. This goes to the root of student writing difficulty. A strategy I took from this course was responding to student writing in a letter-format, similar to a book review, which allows us to treat students as writers we are helping, not students we are correcting.

Coming out of this experience, I wrote a blog post for the WIP website that you can see here.

Taught by Dr. Carolyn M. Jones Medine. This course focuses on developing practices in teaching religious studies for new teachers. We looked at foundational topics such as professionalism and course building, but also explored methods for online teaching and issues specifically related to teaching religion.

Presented by Dr. Mike Palmquist from Colorado State University, this workshop introduced the Writing Across the Curriculum Clearinghouse Resource Center, which focuses on how we incorporate writing throughout the disciplines as a practice in critical thinking. Palmquist reminded us of the practices of Writing in the Disciplines and Writing to Learn, which I had previously learned about as part of my WIPP 7001 class. He, however, wanted to go a step further to think about Writing to Engage, a practice that falls between Writing to Learn and Writing to Communicate/Publish. Writing to Engage focuses on using writing as a critical thinking practice by encouraging students to consider the meaning and implication of course content. Sample assignments might include reflections, critiques of previous writing, or project proposals. The Writing to Engage model influenced many of the assignments I utilized in my RELI 1003 and RELI 4600 courses where I focused on creating space for students to reflect on their learning process and how our course content intersected with their personal contexts.

Given by Andy Mink, this workshop introduced the work of the National Humanities Center through the framework of "Humanities Moments"—times when we encounter a cultural element (art, architecture, literature, etc.) that resonates with us. Reflecting on our personal "Humanities Moment" and how we communicate it with others became an opportunity to consider their impact on how we see ourselves in relation to our community and why we act certain ways. We then explored how we can incorporate "Humanities Moments" into our classrooms as a skill set to navigate an ever-complex world. This included a special attention to "quick-reads" of text, images, videos, etc. and geo-literacy as opportunities to push beyond root memorization of information to begin considering relationships and how we process information. The idea of "Humanities Moments" greatly impacted my philosophy of Humanities education, and throughout my course design I attempted to great room for students to reflect on what elements of the content resonated with them and why that matters.

Taught by Dr. Rosemary Jackson. In Teaching and Diversity, we explored how diverse material and diverse students affect how we teach and how to be more aware of plurality and intersectionality in our classrooms. This course was important for me as I prepared to enter religious education due to the wide range of diversity in both the subject matter and in how students experience religion, which is often a very personal issue. A key theme that influenced my thinking in the course was having awareness of our own identity and how that is communicated to students in relation to their identity and our course material. The interactions with the professor in this course had an important impact on my Diversity Statement.

This was a self-paced, online certificate program that offers an introduction to digital learning. This included going over key terms, introducing best practices, highlighting challenges, and outlining disability accessibility. One of the most beneficial elements of the certificate was hearing more from professionals about how they approached incorporating digital learning into their classrooms, including specific examples and techniques. For instance, there was an element about how to incorporate activities into Zoom synchronous sessions that resonated with activities I have used from the "Humanities Moments" workshop. I also appreciated the focus on formative assessments and how to use digital learning as a pathway to create adaptive formative assessments. Another element of the course that I found valuable was its early introduction to major theories of pedagogy and andragogy. While I was unconsciously using much of the techniques advocated by learning theory, it was very empowering to see several of my approaches supported by the research.