Wednesday, June 11, 2008

R/D11

While reading Chapter 27 (R/D11), reflect on what you perceive to be your own areas of strength and what competencies you feel you need to work hardest to develop given your professional goals. State and describe at least three competencies you’d like to develop and why.

Some of my strengths are:
  • Developing instructional materials
  • promoting transfer of knowledge and skills
  • prepare for instruction and improve organization
  • communicating (verbally) effectively
  • apply basic research skills to design project

As a teacher I would like to develop further the following competencies:
  • Select and use a variety of techniques for determining instructional content
  • Stimulate and sustain learner motivation
  • Provide clarification and feedback
  • promote retention of knowledge and skills
  • Use performance analysis to program
The above bulleted competencies I feel are all essential parts of instruction that I feel I could improve on.   The main one that I really would like to develop many strategies for would be to learn more about stimulating and sustaining learner motivation.  I feel that many staff members would love to go through PD in this area.  Different classrooms and subjects are more prone to having apathetic kids and it is a great skill for a teacher to motivate and sustain motivation.   The other bulleted competencies are areas I desire to have professional growth.  Providing feedback, especially positive feedback is essential to teaching behaviors and in middle school behaviorism is always alive.  Also, I feel it is important to promote retention and skills that can be built upon.  If our students are constantly filling and purging their brains, it is difficult to make connections later on.  

The competencies in this chapter are very interesting as we get to self analyze, which is the first step in developing/designing a better teacher!

1 comment:

Mrs. Kline said...

Matt PD's on motivating students and holding retention levels would be very helpful. These are tools we as educators always need to keep up on. We need to share and learn how to keep up with the students needs.