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While I did pretty well (one misplaced on each side) I think that this is an example of a slightly biased survey. The questions seemed to be worded in such a way that you were obviously not supposed to pick one or you were a the wrong kind of teacher.
While I am a (I hope) student-centered teacher, I feel that some activities, lesson styles etc. are appropriate, even though they may (gasp!) appear teacher-centered. For me it comes down to a choice between being student centered and differentiating lessons. Differentiation is something that I feel should be done. With that in mind there are students (I was/am one) that enjoy a lecture. They learn that way and it is a teacher centered lesson.
Like most things in left; it is the middle ground that achieves the most. Extremism leaves too many people unaccounted for.
Here is the interview from the Discussion Board:
Hello Class!
Melisssa is a college professor and director of the radiation therapy program at UW-La Crosse in La Crosse, WI. She has been an educator for 2 years now and prior to that was a radiation therapist and medical dosimetrist (treatment planning) at a cancer center in Colorado Springs, CO (about two hours from Alex’s hometown of Loveland). She and her husband Matt have been married for almost 10 years and have 2 kids, Wyatt age 5 (just started Kindergarten) and Ayda, age 2 1/2 (which she emphatically mentions the 1/2 to anyone when they ask her age!). She has worked on online course development and taught online in the summer and is so excited to be able to learn about more assessment methods through this course.
Alex is a High School history teacher at the American International School of Riyadh Saudi Arabia. He and his wife (and two kids, Isabel – six today! and Dante, three and a half) have been in Riyadh for five full school years and have two more to go. Before this they were in Mexico City for three years at the American School Foundation. Alex teaches US History, World History II and one class called Information Technology in a Global Society (ITGS) which is part of the IB program. The ITGS class is mostly on-line now, but he would like to improve his delivery, assessment and content. And, as it turns out, their entire school is going online as the King has temporarily closed all schools due to H1N1 (strictly as a preventative matter) so he will have to learn to adapt the history classes fast! His interests include reading (mostly history), travel and working on the family cabin in Wyoming…sadly a long way from Riyadh.
Creating another blog actually caused a few problems, that though they were a pain this time around helped illuminate a few issues concerning blogs. The main problem was that my log-in to Word Press (my favorite blog tool) took me to the blog my wife uses for her class. Unfortunately we did not discover this until I had reset the password and noticed that there seem to be two administrators for one blog. For the life of me I did not know we had set it up this way. As our school is not totally on line she was understandably stressed at the thought that her students might not be able to access the blog.
That problem resolved it was on to creating a new account under a new email…which ment creating a POP account so that I don’t have to check a thousand different emails.
The up side to all of this, readings from this week included, is that I have really been experiencing things from the student perspective. This, in my opinion is one of the best ways to make sure you are an effective teacher. Our superintendent had to come around to the whole school today and ask everyone to back off a little as many teachers were overloading students. This is so easy to do, especially when you forget that they have seven other classes besides your own.
